Summer is slipping away, like the silent falling of petals. Everyone has left. We are on our own. The swallows gather, autumn sets in, rustic and rather rainy. The land grows green again, revivified. Grass, dry and brittle as old bones during all those hot months, shoots up overnight, and daisies sprout everywhere. They are crisply white, innocent and child-like, an unpretentious flower. I stroll along the terraces, studying the ripening olives, which are a light violet now, or piebald green and mauve, picking slender-stalked handfuls of wildflowers. I carry these back to the house to place in jars on the tables. They swoop and lift toward the first tendrils of sunlight creeping round the corner of the house, and I am delighted by their ordinariness.
It is Saturday morning. Herby scents in an immaculately well-washed day. Michel is somewhere at the foot of the hill, planting a wheelbarrow full of purple and white irises which we have dug up from numerous terraces where they are multiplying in wild profusion. He is using them to create a border to our new fence and the arbuste of laurel.
René arrives, bearing two plastic shopping bags full of small black grapes. “Framboises,” he announces. I am confused.
He laughs at my expression. “These grapes are known as raspberries.”
“Why?”
“Taste them.”
Surprisingly, they taste exactly like raspberries.
He is about to escort us—we were expecting him the day before yesterday, but no matter—on a visit to one of the farms he tends in the arrière-pays, the hinterland. He and I make ourselves comfortable on the upstairs terrace and settle down to un verre while we wait for Michel to complete his gardening chores. I glance at my watch as René pours our chilled beers, and I smile silently. It is not yet ten-thirty. Years of restraint, of broken diets followed by insufferable guilt, sleepless nights and a sense of inadequacy, all to stuff myself into costumes a size too small but befitting the television or silver screen: someone else’s notion of sex appeal. And here I am, bright and early on a Saturday morning, dressed like a Mediterranean construction worker in boots and shorts, facing with delight the frothy liquid on the table in front of me, learning to live at peace with the hedonist in my soul.
“Thirsty work,” proclaims René, lifting his glass. For a second I think he must be referring to my inner reflections, and then I notice his attention is directed toward poor Michel, whose silhouette moves in and out of view as he bends and rises in the process of digging and planting.
René begins to recount tales of his life as a truck driver before he retired. He has an extraordinary assortment to tell of the years of German occupation here on the coast, when he and his truck were used by the Resistance to ferry food from place to place after curfew, so no French families went without. He paints a tantalizing picture of “man and his trusty steed”—in this case his truck—of rations redirected, une petite escroquerie here and une petite escroquerie there. He must have been hard at work on the trail of Robin Hood.
Escroquerie. I love this word. Although it is not specifically a Provençal noun, it does seem to sum up so much of the way of life here. Une escroquerie is a swindle…
My attention returns to our sanguine-complexioned olive man. He is now describing to me in detail, using his hands for dramatic effect, how to skin and eat a hedgehog. The cooking is not complicated, he assures me. Is he thinking I might rush to the butchers and give this a go?
Boil it first in a bouillon, then slit it open down the middle of its soft side—its belly side—“as though cutting open a cushion,” and peel the skin off the same way you would a diving suit!
“What about its quills?—
“Bah, they fall away as easily as picking out cotton stitching once the animal has been boiled.”
I cannot picture adding this recipe to the cookbook, but I refrain from saying so. Another staple food here during the Second World War, again during the occupation, was the guinea pig. According to René, guinea pigs, cochons d’inde, are an excellent source of fat. This was an important factor, because fat was always in short supply, and it made the meat edible, too. Any animal that has plenty of fat on it makes good eating, he explains. I am beginning to think I prefer the rigors of the actress’s diet!
He reaches for another bottle of the blond beer, tops up his glass and embarks on his descriptions of the occupation of the grand hotels and maisons particulières along the coast, of shells exploding, of the Maquis preparing for the liberation. Here he interrupts himself: “Do you know why the Resistance or underground forces were called Maquis?” he asks, but does not wait for my response. “Because that is the name of the brush or scrubland that grows all along these Mediterranean and Corsican coastlines—to take to the bush, to go underground. And so they were named le Maquis. They were very active here in Provence, and without them it is unlikely that the Allied invasion of ’44 would have proved such a success.” I had known this, but I feign surprise and René shrugs that Provençal shrug. He genuinely delights in telling tales, and I seem to be his perfect audience. He goes on, swiftly describing nights spent in the shelters—not all misery, according to him, which leads him quite naturally to the wartime romancing of a nightclub singer in Marseille.
“Diable, she had great legs!” He grins and begins a saucy observation about his height and the length of her legs, seems to think better of it, glances at me in an impish way, blushes and deflects. Now he is describing the courting of a local girl, and paints pictures of their lovemaking on the beaches while guns were firing all around them. She was three years his senior and, in those days, was deemed a daring and romantic choice. Later, she became his wife and is housebound now.
Michel is ascending the drive with the wheelbarrow. He waves.
René turns his attention to more pressing matters: plants and l’entretien of the oliviers. The pruning and maintenance of all plants and the olive trees in particular clearly ignites his passion as readily as his reminiscenes of the good old days. While I listen and watch, I perceive in his piercingly blue eyes the joy of a life richly lived.
“Quite a lady’s man, eh, René?” I tease.
“Ah, yes, I’m very lucky,” he mutters, gazing out across the view, sipping his beer. “You don’t know the half of it.”
WHEN MICHEL IS READY, we set off on the first trip of what is to be our pre-harvest petit pèlerinage, our olive pilgrimage. This morning we are driving inland, winding up and around the leafy corkscrew lanes, gazing back onto spectacular coastal scenery: sweeping bays, a lone helicopter traversing an electric-blue sky, forests of sailboats like miniature flags waving back at us from the glassy expanses of the Med. We are climbing to a cooler altitude, a remoter province, a rural world where little traffic passes save for a few trucks and grunting soil-beaten tractors. Everywhere, with the exception of the olive and the cypress, the trees are turning striking tones of amber and ruby red. There is a remarkable stillness in the air. Twenty minutes inland, and we might have turned back the clock a half a century.
This particular olive farm is approached along a well-hidden track, a bumpy, rutted trail better suited to tractors than René’s diesel-powered Renault. The gate is well worn, askew and held fast with with a rusted padlock and chain. Inside the grounds there is a long straight drive climbing a steep stony path, flanked by terraced groves on either side. This leads directly to the farmhouse, set, rather like ours, halfway up the hillside.
The salmon-pink house, with its fading grass-green shutters, is an ancient bastide all but forgotten in this deep countryside. Situated south of a rocky mass of land known as the Pre-Alpes of Castellane, it looks out in sunlit seclusion across the valley toward a hilltop village named Gourdon.
Its edifice is cracked and aging. The Parisian proprietor, now well into his eighties, visits the farm for only one month during the year, in the height of summer. For the other eleven months, the place is locked up and unused. No one except René comes near it, which saddens me, recalling how neglected Appassionata had been when we first found her. To the left of the farmhouse are the stables. These have been converted into a bathroom—there is another in the main house—so that the old gentleman can shave in peace and not be pestered by his grandchildren first thing in the morning. A vine laden with pendulous green grapes gives shade to a cracked concrete patio. The look of the place reminds me of one of those early Dubonnet commercials I used to see on television when I was tiny. I had never visited France in those days, but the pictures struck me as so gloriously foreign, so happy-go-lucky, so much the French idyll. Perhaps that’s why I’m here!
This farm boasts one hundred and thirty trees, thirty of which are the originals and have grown on these terraces for somewhere in the region of two hundred and fifty to three hundred years. Their trunks are wrinkled and gnarled like old elephant skin. The younger trees, planted by our absent proprietor, are barely twenty-five years old but for the most part are fruiting well. They are of a different variety known as tanche. The ancients, with their thick tormented trunks, are of the variety known as cailletier, the variety we have inherited.
René picks off a drupe and hands it to me to examine. “The cailletier is renowned for the rich golden oil it produces as well as its superior quality. It is a tree rustiqe perfectly capable of sustaining long periods of drought, and in times gone by, its oil was sought after by the perfume houses, particularly those in Grasse, because that golden hue was judged a marvelous addition to any scent.” Locally, it is known as the Nice olive and exists predominantly along this coastal strip. It grows taller than any other variety of olive tree yet produces the smallest fruit. Take a trip deeper into the hills of Provence, and you will discover shorter, stubbier varieties. This is a natural protection against the harsh mistral winds which blow fierce and unrelenting farther inland, at higher altitudes.
We trail from terrace to terrace, watching while René checks on the progress of his purpling fruit. Suddenly he stops, pulls a mottled leaf from one of the young zinc-gray trees and turns it over with a frown.
“Paon,” he says sombrely.
“Paon?” I repeat, surprised, looking about for exotic birds. The word means peacock.
He nods, then explains. The peacock was a domestic animal on many farms in this part of France. When the male struts and screeches and fans open its tail, the compelling blue and green plumage reveals a series of circular black spots. There is an olive tree malady, Cyclocodium Oleaginum, known in layman’s terms as oeil de paon, eye of peacock, because its fungus scars the silvery green foliage with round black spots before jaundicing the leaves, which eventually drop from the branches. He hands us the leaf, and we both examine it. “Watch out for it on your trees.”
Even to us amateurs, it is obvious that the leaf has turned a dusty yellow and is dappled with dark brown blotches. I am concerned for the welfare of the fruit, but he assures us that this particular ailment will not harm the olives at all. However, if ignored, the leaves will fall, denuding every branch. Within a year, he warns us soberly, the entire tree will be bald. And it spreads fast. It is highly contagious.
“After the harvest—it is too late for this season, I would risk poisoning the fruit—I will be obliged to treat every tree on every terrace here on this farm.”
Naive on my part, of course, but I had not even considered the dangers of olive tree maladies, and I am rather horrified to learn from René that there are nine insect or fungus diseases for which we will need to keep a wary eye out. Some of these can be carried by the tools used to prune the trees. In such cases, the tools need to be disinfected after the pruning of each and every tree. He laughs when he sees my expression and assures me that such cases are rare here, more common in Algeria.
During the drive home, I remark on the number of hilltop villages in this part of southern France and learn from Michel that most are built on sites originally chosen by marauding Saracens as strategic lookout points best suited for the building of fortresses. Once these bloodthirsty invaders had been defeated and the region reclaimed, villages were constructed on the ruins of the defeated territories to protect the people against the return of their enemies or the arrival of future aggressors.
The Saracens—a collective name for Arabs, Moors, Berbers and Turks—have been painted by history as a thoroughly disreputable lot, invaders who did nothing for the region besides rape and pillage, but in fact made certain contributions to local learning and tradition. They taught the Provençal people much about natural medicines and how to utilize the bark of the cork oaks to make cork—where would the wine industry have been without it?—and to extract resin from the numerous regional pines. Their other significant addition to local culture was to teach the native people how to play the tambourine—not that I can own to having noticed a single sun-wrinkled Provençal roaming about the village streets or his places des boules, watched over by the silent shadows of towering plane trees, happily tapping his tambourine.
Dropping back toward the sea, descending into a gentler clime, we drive by squads of people mustering in the numerous country lanes and hidden grasslands. They are sporting baskets and sticks and do not look as though they are embarking on jolly weekend rambles; they seem intent on some far more serious activity. And indeed they are.
“It’s the funghi season,” Michel reminds me. Ah yes, I remember the group I confronted on our own hill the previous autumn and suggest to Michel that it might be fun to try our hands at mushroom picking.
There is a village in Italy in the Apennines named Piteglio where, in the late nineteenth century, the inhabitants used to gather during the funghi season and collect three thousand pounds of mushrooms every day. We are neither so actively committed nor in possession of a hill quite so fecund. Nevertheless, on Sunday morning, a gentle, sunny late-October day, we go mushroom picking. Clad in Wellingtons as protection against the brambles and damp undergrowth, we pick our way up to the brow of our hill, where blocks of sunlight cut sharp right angles through the lofty trees. This is a delightful way of working up a thirst and an appetite for lunch, I soon discover. I hear and then catch sight of a woodpecker and a pair of whoopees. The earth is spongy underfoot and crackly from the sinking layers of pine needles. The scent of humid pine hangs in the air as we bend and forage. Fat cones, like sleeping Humpty Dumptys, turn and roll in our wake. The mushrooms are everywhere, barely hidden, soft and slippery, pushing up through the damp earth and pine needles. I have to watch my step or I squash them, or the big brown snails I find hidden on twigs and runkled leaves. Rich dark soil slides beneath my fingernails as I scratch and scoop at its surface. I want to feel the silky mushroom textures, but I am unsure about touching them. I am no expert and have little idea which of the funghi, the champignons, are edible and which are poisonous, and Michel is barely better informed. But, we tramp the woods merrily, searching and gathering with vigor, storing our hoard in woven wooden baskets. Once back at the house, working at our long table in the garden, we sort them carefully into floppy heaps according to their shape, size and possible variety. We have done rather well, and I fear we may end up wasting them.
“No, if they are all edible,” Michel says, “we’ll cook some in vinegar to preserve as antipasto.”
We place one example of each onto a tray, careful not to damage them, then hasten to the village. Our regular pharmacie is closed on Sunday mornings, so we visit another, where a thin, stooped pharmacist with greased flat hair peers at our pickings with disdain.
“I wouldn’t touch any of them” is his pronouncement.
We are silenced by disappointment.
“Are you sure, none at all?”
With the tips of two tweezerlike fingers, his pinky curled in the air like an old maid sipping tea, he begins lifting one after another by their tufted or fleshy stems still thick with dried earth. He twizzles each one in turn, glares at it and then tutts.
“Faux, faux,” he accuses, damning each poor vegetable before dropping it as though it were excrement back onto the tray. “Eat them if you like, but I wouldn’t.”
Michel picks up a vaguely mottled ocher example and offers it for consideration. “I thought perhaps this might be un lactaire, non?”
“Perhaps it is, perhaps it isn’t.”
Michel turns the mushroom over to convince the pharmacist. Beneath its fleshy cap, its corrugated belly, the gills are undeniably reddish. He breaks the stalk in two. The flesh inside is also red.
“Oui, peut-être ça c’est de la variété lactaire,” this dry-spirited chemist concedes without enthusisam. “You might try that one but none of the others. They are champignons vénéneux. Even that one might be riddled with maggots.” And with that he disappears, determined not to be moved to any height of joy.
“Merci, Monsieur,” we call after him with a twinkle.
We return home carrying our tray heavy with assorted poisons, to our table in the autumnal garden piled high with our seven stacks.
“I think he may have been a little damning of our efforts, but we better not risk it.” Dear Michel, he patiently gathers up our morning’s efforts and dumps the entire harvest into the dustbin. One dustbin full of decomposing, deadly mushrooms, and eight edible lactaire. Hardly competition for the Italian peasants in the village of Piteglio, but more than sufficient for our own consumption. Not even vaguely downhearted, we lunch sumptuously on our eight home-grown mushrooms, sliced into slivers and simmered lightly in olive oil seasoned with garlic, salt and pepper and chopped herbs from the garden, served with grated Parmesan and washed down with a bottle of red from Châteauneuf-du-Pape, all on the terrace in the autumn sunshine.
We learn later from our own pharmacist that the mushrooms we have eaten are known as lactaire délicieux or, in English, saffron milk-caps. “They grow beneath pine trees and are excellent.”
We vouch for their delicious nutty flavor and confirm that we gathered them from the summit of our hill in the pine forest.
“The Russians preserve them in salt, you know.” He shows us the chart he keeps on display for ignoramuses such as us, and we see at least one from those we threw in the dustbin. It is the large white variety known here as faux mousseron or, in English, fairy-ring mushroom. I am very taken with the notion that we have fairy rings of any sort on the land. On our way home, still in a mushroom mood, we stop off at the vegetable market and buy half a kilo of ceps to add to a risotto.
It is a perfect evening at the end of a tranquil, uneventful and too-short day, even though the clocks have gone back an hour. Already the sun is setting, and it is growing chilly. Lights on the hills are illuminated. Everywhere the comforting whiff of wood smoke trails the dusk. Michel is stoking the fire while, a terrace beneath him, I creep naked into the pool. A fig leaf turned saffron with the season falls from the tree and floats into the water to accompany me. The cold shocks my system, and my toes and fingers start to tingle. I splash and throw my body in unflinchingly, swimming fast and determinedly, growing accustomed to the icy temperature. I pound up and down, not daring to slow in case my flesh numbs. Then I leave the pool, heart pounding, flesh zinging, and run around the garden whooping and calling like an Indian on the warpath. The dogs are barking at me, and Michel runs out onto the terrace to see what is up. I am laughing lightheartedly.
“I think there must have been hallucinogens in the mushrooms,” he calls and returns inside to more constructive chores.
A DELUGE OF RAIN descends. Tropical in its intensity, it shocks. Day after day, it sheets across the hills making it impossible to discern the line of horizon between sea and sky. The sky glowers blackly. The days are somber. Drops the size of dinner plates splash into the pool, which looks as though it may burst its banks and roll like Niagara onto the terraces.
We are confined to the house, to our books and projects. To wine and food, to each other. I am at work on my scripts again, reshaping them to include Michel’s observations, but there are times when the labor goes slowly and I lose confidence and spend restless hours pressed against the long, steamy windows staring out at the clouds which have hidden the valley from sight. We are very short of money. I need to press on if we are to secure a contract to shoot next summer. The rain drips and sloshes, gushing and gurgling urgently from every pipe. Lightning strikes; the electricity goes dead. We run through the rain to the garage and switch the trip back on. It flicks on and then off again. We live by candlelight. Thunder rolls and roars. The dogs howl and whine, terrified. We drag them in by the fire to soothe and dry them. The rooms are pervaded with the smell of wet dog.
The baked land welcomes the weather. The plants suck it up greedily, but we are less grateful, for we are discovering cracks and fissures we didn’t know existed. Under the French doors, the water sneaks in and settles in puddles on the tiles. I hasten to the bathroom to fetch towels. I hear dripping and running and splashing everywhere, a cacophony of water music. Back and forth I go, armed with bowls and plastic pails to plug the invasive percussion. Fortunately, Di Fazio’s roof is holding. At every minute, I expect the whole thing to come crashing down on top of us, but this is an ancient house built of sterner stuff. It may shift and leak and groan like an old man sleeping, but it will never fall down.
Eventually, the rain stops. The sky clears instantly and returns to its crisp laundered blue. It smiles seductively as though the torrents never happened. The sun bursts brightly forth, the days grow warm again and my mood lifts.
The wise men of the olive world say that, as with the grape, the sun of September determines the quality of the fruit, but here is the difference: rain in October and early November is essential to give the drupe that final, essential burst of growth. Unlike most northern-hemisphere produce, the olive is not harvested in the autumn. It still has another six weeks’ to two months’ growth, and a nicely plumped olive, with its pulp rich in minerals and vitamins, produces a greater quantity of quality oil.
But this year, nature’s waterwork has overreached itself.
We stalk the terraces, taking note of the damage and the phenomenal growth that has taken place in the space of a week. Fascinated by the light and the luxuriance of the vegetation, I seek out the scents and sounds of a rain-washed world like a dog trained for truffle hunting. The orange trees, dead as mummies when we bought the house and which we have watched creeping back to life throughout the summer months, are now sharp, five feet tall, brilliant green spears of life. And, what is more miraculous to me, they are laden with round green balls. Minuscule oranges.
Such renascence hardly seems possible. I close my eyes. Like a squirrel preparing for harsh days, I store the fact that rebirth is a resource of life. Some creeping shadow warns me that I will need to keep it in mind.
A few feet to the left of the oranges, among the tufted grass at the root of the prehistoric olive trunks, I detect puddles of purple and green, tiny hard pellets. I pick one up to examine it and identify it as unripened olive fruit which the force of the rain has driven from the branches. I call to Michel, who is bent on his haunches to photograph a harvest of bulbs which have metamorphosed into dwarf-size narcissi overnight.
“We ought to net the trees before we lose the crop,” he suggests.
I try to reach René, but he is not home. His wife promises to “faire le commission,” which means that she will tell him we called. He does not ring back, not today or the next. We make a tour of the sodden springy earth around the roots of the trees again and agree that the ratio of fruit on the ground to fruit on the branches is shifting in balance. Whether the rain started the downward flow, the olives have been attacked by a fly or another of the nine maladies René mentioned that we know nothing about, or they have simply ripened too early, our inexperience cannot guide us, but we decide that the grounds must be netted.
I am confident we can manage this part of the operation on our own and suggest to Michel that the Coopérative Agricole might be the very place to guide us with our needs. He agrees and waves me off in the Renault, which is becoming a greater health hazard every day, to purchase netting while he reads through my latest pages of work. Naturally, the purchase is not as straightforward as I had hoped.
The chief gardener at the cooperative, a ruddy-cheeked, bespectacled young man, is sent out to deal with me, the foreigner attempting to go native. His patience for such an animal clearly ran out seasons ago.
“Oui?”
“I would like to buy netting, please, for our olive trees.”
“Which color?”
Color!
Price, quality, even dimensions, I was vaguely prepared for, but not color. The French bourgeois obsession for matching and designing every item of house and gardenware cannot, surely, have stretched to the color of olive grove nets, can it?
“Does it matter?” I ask sheepishly, certain that my response is only going to confirm his already formed opinion that I am a city-bred ninny wasting his precious time. He sighs theatrically and stomps off. I hesitantly stay where I am until he spins around and orders me to follow him, which, obediently, I do. We arrive in front of a massive roll of bright red netting spooled onto an iron bar operated by a rusting handle which looks as though it has been plucked from a nineteenth-century laundry wringer.
“Rouge,” he says.
I could not disagree.
“Is this the one you want?”
“Oui, peut-être.” I am doing my best.
“Deux francs vingt,” he tells me, as though, for someone as ignorant as myself, cost would be the deciding factor. I am taken aback by the price, which strikes me as extremely reasonable at approximately twenty-two pence.
“A meter?” I feel I should confirm the good news.
“Par six, le longeur.”
By six in length. We are getting somewhere. Sounds good, I tell him. He looks disappointed and vaguely impatient with me and proceeds to tug at the red netting with his fingers until a small strip of it begins to split.
“Eh, voilà!”
I assume he has made this little test to prove to me that the net is not too difficult to cut, but no.
“You see, if you had decided upon the green…”
“Ah, the green?”
“Two francs ninety.”
Tucked away at the back of an enormous hangar area, protected by corrugated roofing, is the green. Similarly rolled, marginally longer, but otherwise identical to my eye. He strides toward it, unfurls a few feet and begins tugging. Nothing happens.
“Costaud,” I confirm with the nod of a sage who knows what she is talking about. It is tougher, more resilient. It won’t rip when, by mistake, someone—me—treads all over it. I understand, and he is pleased with me. At least I think he is, because he grunts and begins to unroll a length of many meters in readiness for the cut.
“How many meters would you like?”
I smile, attempting charm. “Well, I’m not exactly sure.”
The netting is dropped to the ground. A fellow gardener from somewhere far off calls, “Frédéric!”
“J’arrive!”
I feel my time is running out. I begin to talk fast. “We have sixty-four trees, so that would be…”
“What are the size, the reach of the branches? What age are the trees? Are they facing south? Have you measured the circumference of the root areas? What variety?”
To each question, I shake my head.
Poor Frédéric is growing exasperated, and I am mortified, knowing that I have played my part of the amateur olive farmer only too convincingly.
“I tell you what,” he suggests with a warmth I had not counted on at this stage. “Buy a roll! Pourquoi pas? It is considerably cheaper, and that way you can measure the lengths at home and cut the nets accordingly.”
It sounds like an excellent idea and lets us both off the hook. I agree wholeheartedly. He points me to the caisse situated inside in the shop and asks which car is mine. I signal the wreck parked near the gate and hurry off to pay. While in the shop, I pick up the odd extra purchases—oil for the chainsaw, blocks of olive oil soap as hefty as building bricks, thirty kilos of dog biscuits—and pull out my check book. The girl rings up the items and announces a figure which is a little short of five thousand francs.
“Five thou… ?”
It is then that I learn that I have just purchased a thousand meters of green netting. I dare not change my mind, so I smile wanly and write out the check, which will just about empty my account.
Outside, I find Frédéric and his colleague closing up the car, which looks as though it has sprouted wings. Not surprisingly, the roll could not be squeezed into the trunk; nor would it fit in the car’s interior, so it has been wedged between the front passenger seat and the rear seat directly behind my driving place. In each case, it is protuding from the open windows a full eighteen inches or more.
“Isn’t this a little dangerous?” I mutter. Frédéric is not interested; he is now serving someone else. I start up the engine, blue smoke billows forth and off I roar, trying not to take the garden center gates with me.
By the time I haul up the drive, I am exhausted and my nervous system has been shot to pieces. Half of Provence has hooted or yelled at me, and while I was being rudely overtaken on a roundabout by a very impatient gentleman, my precious netting actually dislodged his passenger-side driving mirror and he was about ready to run me into the gutter. Still, I am home more or less in one piece, and more importantly, we have our filets. Michel is laughing loudly, No Name and her three remaining puppies are scrambling around my ankles, barking and mewling enthusiastically—they can smell biscuits—but nothing we do, no matter how we shove or pull or tug, will shift the thousand-meter roll of netting.
Exhausted, we finally manage to contact René. When he arrives and sees the netting, he stops and stares at it in puzzled amazement. “But why didn’t you buy the white?” he demands.
HOW DIFFICULT CAN it be to lay a length of netting around the foot of a tree? Is it feasible that this work could take three men and myself as many days? There is a skill to it that I would not have fathomed. First, the brush-cutting machines need to clear a circle of approximately six meters in every direction around the foot of each tree. This is to make sure the net doesn’t get tangled in growing herbage and to facilitate the collection of the fallen olives later. After Michel and Quashia have completed this part of the process, the first day is almost over, and the evening air has an oniony scent to it. I love it; freshly mown grass never had quite that same piquancy. I assume it is the mixture of those extra ingredients: felled wild garlic, dandelion for mesclun, wild and unidentified Provençal herbs.
When the auspicious moment arrives for the laying of the first net, René explains that the ground needs to be covered to the farthest reach of every branch, wasting no meterage, cutting the netting as infrequently as possible and marking out the lengths immediately, by numbering both tree and net, so that next year the whole process is not a complete muddle while we casse our têtes trying to work out which length goes where. And while all this is going on, how best to keep the overexcited puppies from sitting on the netting or your feet every time you want to unroll a length or readjust the positioning of it? How much netting can three puppies chew and destroy while your back is turned for five minutes? The men allocate me the task of puppy patrol.
René’s white netting is harder and less flexible but not necessarily more durable. And it doesn’t blend into the colors of nature so naturally. I prefer the green, but I keep that opinion very close to my chest—that is, until the sun shines through the branches, which hang low like full skirts, and the nets and the silvery underside of the leaves begin to glint, and the entire effect resembles a cascading platinum sea. Green or white, nature creates magnificence.
Toward dusk on the third day, when the nets are in place, carefully symmetrical so that not one poor migrant olive can escape, we lay boulders and sticks at strategic points to hinder movement and to create a basin effect, a cradle, so that with any wind or heavy rain, the fruit will not roll away. I place a large stone at the border of a net and rise, worn out in a positive, healthy way. The men are at work one terrace beneath me, unrolling the last of the meters, shouting to one another, debating. René, Quashia and Michel and the netting, bathed in the golden light of evening: that late-autumn sunlight, honeyed and still, which is particular to this climate. The sight of the men on the land and meters of netting calls to mind preparations for a rural wedding feast, with veils and dresses and local produce. A feast, yes, for at the end of all this, the ritual of the harvesting and pressing, there will be a grand fête, a street party held in the villages, a Mediterranean thanksgiving to l’arbre roi de Provence or l’arbre immortel.
The work we are doing here is keeping faith with the past. It has been acted out for thousands of years, the labors of the land. The olive is un arbre noble, a noble tree. According to biblical legend, it survived the great deluge of Noah and his ark; the dove brought its branch as a sign of peace and that the rains had finally subsided. There is no other artisan who works with tools which are several hundred years old. Indeed, in the eyes of the oléiculteur, the older the better.
There is dignity and humility in this work, in the yielding to it, the power and force and, on occasion, the cruelty of nature as well as its phenomenal generosity. Its fruits should not be wasted. I read somewhere this morning, in one of the many French books on horticulture pratique that litter the wooden table in my still-undecorated atelier, yet another version of those bygone beginnings of olive farming: the cultivation of olive groves and the pressing of the fruit began in Iran long before it was thought of in Greece. Old Testament territory. The Iranians took the olive to Greece. But it was the inhabitants of Phoenicia, an ancient territory which consisted of a narrow strip of coastal land bordering Syria, to the northwest of Palestine, who brought the trees to France some eight hundred years before Christ, approximately three hundred years before the Greeks arrived here. Or was it the Greeks those three centuries later, as most contend? The fact is that the history of the olive is so buried in the distant past that no one seems certain of its precise beginnings. What is certain is that we are here today, Arab and European, embarking on a method of farming—revered in both the Koran and the Bible—a gathering and pressing, almost as old as life itself.