‘So it must rain here, sooner or later,’ says Clare.
‘Oh, yes. It’s long overdue. Mind you, last year was a disaster – such a drought! And all the men muttering darkly about the harvest, all the time. Oh, it was grim. This year’s been positively soggy in comparison,’ says Marcie. ‘We had one rainstorm – well, you would have had to see it to believe it. You see the way the ground goes into that shallow gully out front there?’ She points out of the window, and Clare nods. ‘Full of water. Running like a river. It was amazing! I went a little bit nuts at the sight of it – I’d have paddled in it if Leandro hadn’t stopped me. They all just stood there and stared at it – all the farm boys. Like they’d never seen such a thing, and I suppose maybe they never had. It was all gone by the next morning, of course.’
‘Oh, look at the bats!’ says Pip, pointing up. Along one ceiling beam are a clustered line of dark bodies, silent and unmoving.
‘Ugh! Don’t!’ Marcie shudders. ‘It’ll be far, far better if I just pretend they aren’t there. Now, first things first. Some exercises to loosen us up and make us breathe and project properly. Filippo, if you’ll join me.’ She steps up onto the dais and shakes out her arms.
For almost an hour Clare watches Pip and Marcie inhaling and do-re-me-ing; rolling their heads, shaking their hands, expanding their ribcages. They each recite a favourite poem and then some lines from a play, and Marcie gives tips in the same breath as she praises, and Clare thinks that she would have made an excellent teacher if she hadn’t ended up on a remote farm in the remotest part of Italy. The smell of the guano makes her head ache; dust from the sofa makes her itch. It’s all she can do to sit still, not get up and run somewhere; she doesn’t know where. Then the dogs all start barking at once, the metal gates squeal and they hear a motor pulling in. Marcie pauses, then beams and claps her hands.
‘That’s a wrap, Pip – here’s your pop and my Leandro!’ She ushers them out, biting her lips and patting her hair into its neat wave. Clare’s hair is unravelling from its knot, as usual; she knows her face is shiny from the heat, and she doesn’t care. She doesn’t care if Boyd sees her that way, and can’t decide if she envies or pities Marcie for her devotion to beauty, and her obvious devotion to her husband. Clare wouldn’t want Ettore Tarano to see her wearing make-up. She wouldn’t want to accentuate the obvious – that their two lives, their two worlds, could not be further apart. It troubles her, as they go down to the courtyard, to realise that it’s his eyes she’s trying to see herself through, not Boyd’s.
After he’s spoken with his nephew, and they’ve eaten lunch, Leandro insists on taking them on a tour of the farm, and the four of them follow obediently as he shows them around the barns and the dairy and the dusty olive grove that stretches over several acres to the front of the masseria. Marcie ties a diaphanous scarf over her hat and loosely under her chin, and flaps her hand constantly at the flies.
‘This damned dust gets into everything – you’ll soon see, Clare. Just you wait, when you get ready for bed later you’ll find it in your chemise,’ she says.
‘My Marcie is a city girl,’ says Leandro, with a smile. ‘This is honest dirt, honey. Not like the soot and corruption of New York.’
‘I knew where I was with soot and corruption,’ says Marcie. ‘And there weren’t all these bugs.’
‘My friend John is obsessed with insects,’ says Pip, walking ahead of Boyd and Clare, alongside Leandro and Marcie. ‘He catches them and puts them in jars to study them. Then when they die he pins them to pieces of card and keeps them. Even little tiny gnats and thunderbugs. Although, he has to use glue for the thunderbugs because they’re too small to pin.’
‘Ugh.’ Marcie gives a shudder. ‘And you’re friends with this kid, Filippo?’
‘Better an odd interest than no interests at all,’ says Leandro. ‘I’m an oddity, myself. Just ask anyone around here. Many men who leave Puglia for America never come back. And those that do buy a patch of land, and only then remember what farming down here is like, and are broke again in a matter of months.’
At the far side of the olive field is a trullo built into a section of field wall, sitting empty with weeds growing all around and inside it. Pip ducks inside the small building straight away, picking his way through fallen stones.
‘There’s not much in here,’ he calls out. ‘Lizards and thistles.’
‘Watch out for snakes,’ says Leandro, and laughs when Pip goes still. Clare gives him an anxious look. ‘You should be fine. But mind where you put your feet.’
‘They’re kind of like igloos, aren’t they?’ says Marcie. Boyd is walking slowly around the structure, studying the way the stones are laid.
‘In the sense that the shape of the blocks and of the cone allows for the entire structure to be stabilised without the need for mortar or separate roof supports? Yes, very similar,’ he says.
‘Well, sure.’ Marcie smiles, flustered. ‘That’s exactly what I meant.’
‘There’s a proper chimney,’ says Pip, his voice echoing. Clare peers in; he has his head in the hearth.
‘They’re hovels,’ says Leandro, with a dismissive grunt. ‘Let’s carry on. Much more to see.’
As they walk, Clare finds curiosity overcoming her distrust of Leandro. He is so relaxed, so benign, she can hardly credit her own memory of the way he spoke to her in Gioia.
‘How is farming here, then, Mr Cardetta? You said the men who come back from America try to farm but mostly fail,’ she says.
‘I’m a novelty, Mrs Kingsley, in that I live on the land I own, and run it myself. Most of Puglia is latifundia – huge estates owned by rich, ancient families, some of whom haven’t actually been here in decades. They let the farms out on short leases to tenants who often aren’t even farmers, and have no experience of it at all. They’re speculators, with no incentive to make improvements to the land whatsoever. They make what profit they can and then they leave.’ He shrugs. ‘They use antique ways of farming that exhaust the soil. There’s no irrigation, no effective fertilisation, no proper crop rotation. We’re on the edge of failure, every year. So a drought like last year? Total disaster. Men starving to death in the streets, in some places. The tenants are working with tiny margins – there’s no room for error. They’re on the brink of ruin themselves a lot of the time, and the only thing they can control is how much or little they pay the workers. I hope to break this cycle. This is my land, and I want to see it fruitful and stable. I want to pass it down to my sons thriving.’ He sweeps his arm across the wide view of dry, rocky ground. ‘In whatever limited way it can thrive,’ he amends. Marcie loops her arm through his and squeezes it.
‘My visionary husband,’ she says.
‘Most Puglian landlords hate the place and can’t wait to leave, but not me. The government posts disgraced officials down here as a punishment,’ he says proudly. ‘But I can take whatever Puglia throws at me.’
They have come around in a large loop, and are approaching the masseria buildings from the back. As they get nearer they see two or three men standing around a tethered mule, one of them working bellows into a portable furnace, sweat running down his face. The mule’s mouth has been wedged open with wooden blocks secured with ropes around its head; its top lip is clamped viciously between the metal bars of a device that looks like a giant nutcracker. Each time the animal attempts to move, a hard-faced man gives a jerk of the clamp, and the animal holds still, rolling its eyes, its ears laid flat back against its head.