The Black Well

Having lived here so long Ermenia knows everything about the house and its history. On an early tour of inspection she wrinkled her nose up at the rather naff plastic concertina doors at one end of our kitchen. “You want to get rid of those,” she said, “there’s a nice wooden door that goes there down in the cellar”, which of course there was. She also solved the mystery of our septic tank, in Italian “pozzo nero”, literally “black well”. The estate agents insisted that a rather sad looking stone chamber in the grounds with a broken pipe leading into it was the pozzo nero. In an early experiment we poured a bucket of water down the toilet and waited for it to flow through the broken pipe and saw and heard nothing. I gingerly removed the bit of old tin and pile of stones covering the lid to the stone chamber, sending a horde of small scorpions and wood lice running for cover and found the interior dry and clean. “Are you sure that’s the pozzo nero in the grounds?” We asked Pierot the estate agent a couple of days later and he insisted that it was. Later we asked Ermenia. She laughed, “no that’s the pozzo nero for the washing machine, see, you can put a washing machine in that outhouse and you can supply it with water by connecting up this hose. The real pozzo nero is under the car park over here. It’s very deep underground. Mrs Convertini was a hairdresser and used loads of water, but they never had a problem with it.” Well, so far she had been proved right, our waste water gurgles away happily with no sign of a problem, although I’m also aware that every lifestyle book I’ve ever read includes a septic tank crisis at some point in the narrative.

Erminia and Paolo

Erminia and her husband Paolo, both seventy-eight, live in the house over the road. The second day after we bought the house an aged crone in a floral dress and perhaps three or four teeth, hailed us with a raucous cry. Our Italian is still by no means perfect and Ermenia sometimes speaks in local dialect, which sounds incidentally a bit like Orkish, “Locorotondo” our local town being called something like “Oroondoosh”. But Erminia speaks loudly and clearly on account of Paolo being deaf as a post and I think what she said was something like, “hello, pleased to meet you. You are English? It feels like the whole world is coming to stay in my country (this said with a proud smile). Any time you need anything just pop in and ask. You must meet my Grandson, he’s building the house next to mine to live in with his fiancée. Come and have a look. He’s an electrician and does plumbing and building as well, he can fix your place up no problem.” With that we got the guided tour of the Grandson’s place, then were introduced to Paolo and given biscuits and Limoncello (basically alcoholic Lemsip).

To understand our relationship with Erminia I need to provide a little bit of history and geography. Our house and the one next door owned by the family of architects from Bari, face south over our respective olive groves. At the back of the two houses there is a dirt farm track, which the Bari architects also use to give access to their house (our house has its own drive onto the lane). On the other side of the farm track is Erminia and Paolo’s house and next to it the one being built by the Grandson. The small windows at the back of our house therefore look straight over at Erminia and Paolo’s house. Ermenia and Paolo are Convertinis and other members of the family, including one of Ermenia’s sons, own some of the other houses around. The Bari architects’ house was sold to them by a Convertini, as was ours, so before the recent sales the houses around the farm track were something of a Convertini family compound, although I suspect that relationships between the different branches of the family were not always good. Our house and the Bari architects’ house were built around 1940 of local stone using traditional local methods and Ermenia must have moved here not long after. Paolo, who would have been about fourteen at the time actually worked as the builder’s mate.

Even in this very rural area Erminia and Paolo are I suspect an anachronism, living off the land in the way that people here have for centuries. Paolo has some land planted with vines in the area where he grows grapes for the Cantina Sociale in Locorotondo, a large local wine producer which makes good quality and fashionable white wines for the Italian market. Paolo is a tiny man with a stick and a straw hat who carries himself like someone who has had a stroke down one side of his body. Some mornings the Grandson helps him into his ancient Ape at five or six in the morning. Paolo then launches the Ape with a fearsome roar of its puny engine onto the local roads. The first time I heard this I nearly fell out of bed.

Erminia spends her day working around the house and in her vegetable garden. Outside the house on the edge of the farm track she has a wood fired cooking stove improvised from an old oil drum with a stovepipe sticking out of the side. A couple of days after we moved in Erminia invited us to come and watch the annual family passata making session. Every year they buy in industrial quantities of good Italian tomatoes. These are boiled with a little water and a lot of salt in the oil drum/cooker and then run through a machine which reduces the pulp to a fine mush and ejects the skins at one end. Paolo turns the machine by hand while he and Erminia argue at the top of their voices, one of their sons and his wife and daughter looking on with a mixture of indulgence and exasperation.

Most mornings Erminia brings us something from her garden or storeroom – a bottle or two of passata, homemade wine, fresh pears, tomatoes, green peppers or courgettes. If our little bedroom window is open she will pop her head in and hail Sue. She starts with a sotto voce, “La Signora?”. Four seconds later she says again, a little louder “La Signora!”. Followed by a cry at full belt “LA SIGNORA!!”. We then have a short chat and she passes over her goodies. Most evenings she drops round for a sit down and a chat. Usually about what a hot day it has been and about the family and what they do or are doing. She only stays for ten or fifteen minutes and she likes to leaven the conversation with a little tragedy – a neighbour down the road has cancer or there has been a car crash in Martina Franca. This is usually followed up with a sigh and a comment such as “e una bruta vita” (literally “it’s an ugly life”). One of the first times we met here she told us about one of her grandchildren who was run over and killed by a car in the lane outside our houses about nine years ago. The memory is clearly still very raw for her.

Erminia has also introduced us to what passes for social services around here. The bread van calls every day at about noon. The fruit and veg van comes twice a week and the ice-cream van and the cleaning materials van once a week. This latter announces its arrival with rock music blaring from a loudspeaker, so you can hear its coming all the way from Locorotondo, about three miles distant. However, not all in the garden is really so rosy for Erminia and Paolo. They are approaching eighty and doggedly sticking to the lifestyle they have probably pursued all their married lives, but the strain is beginning to show. Paolo can hardly climb into the cab of his Ape without assistance and we can often hear Erminia crying with frustration at him. She is also not as good on her legs as she used to be and often complains of the searing summer heat. I suspect they may be only a crisis away from a major change in their lives.