On the Shores of the Mediterranean. Eric Newby
at the time of the new moon. No other fate could be expected for it. But that was in the past. Now, in the 1980s, bedsteads disintegrated whatever phase the moon was in.
To prepare this ham it was first kept in salt for a week, then it was put in what looked a bit like an old-fashioned letter press for another week, the pressure being increased daily. It was then hung in a chimney to smoke over a fire of ash wood and after that it was hung for anything from seven months to a year in a dry place, having been previously sprinkled with pepper as a protection against flies which, together with dampness, were its principal enemies. By the time a pršut reached Trieste, a good one was about as expensive as smoked salmon.
The wine was Teran, the product of a close circle of about a dozen villages north of the main road from Trieste to Ljubljana, between the Nanos range and the present frontier with Italy. It is a deep purple colour, almost black, with a taste that some people, when they first try it, compare to that of rusty old nuts and bolts. It is best either with hot food, or else with the pršut and the pogača. It is not a wine to drink by itself. It improves on acquaintanceship.
Meanwhile, we ate and drank, while Marija constantly refilled the glasses, particularly my glass, which somehow became empty quicker than Wanda’s, all the time going on and on to Wanda in Slovene about births and deaths and marriages and who had emigrated where, only pausing to go out and get another bottle.
‘Marija says we must drink,’ Wanda said, I thought illogically. Usually she spends her time telling me not to.
‘I am drinking. It’s you who’s not drinking. Anyway, why doesn’t she drink?’
‘Here, it is not the custom for widows …’
‘It’s not the custom for anyone to drink like this, even where I come from. You’d think she wanted to keep me here in pickle.’
‘Bere! Bere!’ (‘Drink! Drink!’) said Marija, who was already refilling my glass. From the yard outside came the sounds of what later proved to be a free-range chicken being slaughtered.
‘That’s our dinner,’ Wanda said. ‘Now they’re going to pluck it, draw it, truss it, put it in a pot on top of the stove with butter and rosemary. It’s going to be hours before we eat dinner.’
‘How many hours?’
‘Three hours.’
‘It’s only seven o’clock now. It’ll be ten. By then I’ll be dead at this rate. Why didn’t you tell her we’d be happy with something simpler? An omelette or just more pršut, more pogača.’
‘I did but she wouldn’t listen. Now she wants to give you some žganje to keep you going.’
‘Why don’t you stop her? What’s come over you?’
‘She will be very upset if you don’t drink. She will say that you do not like her drinks. Tonight you must drink. It is the custom.’
‘Bere! Bere!’ cried Marija, this by-now-to-me-terrible woman, bringing a clean glass and more than half filling it with žganje, then waving her arms as if she was performing a conjuring trick or conducting some vast alcoholic orchestra. What Wanda said was true. The more I drank the more she seemed to warm to me.
Žganje is the equivalent of Italian grappa or French marc, spirit distilled from the skins, pips and stalks left over after the grapes have been pressed and the wine made, but here, in the sticks, home-made and much stronger than what is normally sold commercially because it has been distilled more often. On top of what I had already drunk it was murderous.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’ve either got to go to bed until it’s time for dinner, or go for a walk or something. I just can’t go on like this.’
‘You can’t, we’re going to sit with the deads.’
‘You mean a wake? What they had for your mother?’
‘I don’t know what you call it in English. In Italian it’s veglia. You sit with the deads.’
‘I know you sit with the deads,’ I said. ‘We did it with your mother.’
‘Yes, that’s right, wake for the deads. A very old lady, ninety-three, called Nunča Pahorča, Marija’s aunt, died this morning. She was very nice. She’s being buried tomorrow.’
‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I’m half tight. If you think I’m going to sit by some dead dear old lady for three hours until dinner’s ready you’ve got it all wrong. Besides, we had enough of this funeral thing in Naples.’
‘It’s better than sitting here getting dronker,’ she said. ‘And I was only joking about the chicken. It was being killed for someone else. Ours is nearly ready. And you know it doesn’t matter about being a bit dronk, others will be dronk also. We shall only stay a few minutes.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Let’s go, before she brings any more žganje. Otherwise it’ll be a double funeral and I don’t fancy sharing a vault with a nice old lady of ninety-three.’
The house in which the remains of Nunča Pahorča were on exhibition was very small, for she had been a widow for twenty years and had moved to it when her husband died when she herself was well over seventy. Nunča means ‘aunt’ in the dialect spoken nearer the Adriatic, where she had once lived, but where she now lived she would have been known as Teta Pahorča.
The heavy old bed in which she had died only a few hours before had been taken to pieces and removed temporarily to a shed in her vegetable garden, where it now stood together with a bedside table on which there were a number of bottles containing various liniments that were sovereign remedies against aches and pains, the sort that have labels with gloomy likenesses of their moustached and bearded inventors and their scrawly, illegible signatures printed on them. Now, washed and changed by a couple of the women of the village who knew how to do these things, she lay dressed from head to foot in her best black, from the black lace mantilla which covered the snow-white hair of which she had been so proud to her black felt boots, on her best linen sheets which were part of her marriage trousseau and which she had kept for more than seventy years for this purpose, in a plastic coffin with simulated metal handles, lined with pink ruched nylon, her now waxen features decently composed but no longer with any human attributes, her hands crossed and holding a candle and a rosary that had been placed in them. The walls of the room had been hung with black cloth by the undertaker’s men; a tall candle burned at each of the four corners of the coffin, and at the foot of it, on a table, there were sprigs of box and a receptacle containing holy water.
The room was full of people. Most had come to pay their respects, take a sprig of the box, dip it in the holy water, sprinkle it over the corpse, stay a little while to pray or talk to relatives and friends about the virtues of the deceased, and have a drink, after which they left to get back to their televisions, and be replaced by other mourners. Some of the men, of whom I was one, were, as Wanda had forecast, a bit ‘dronk’.
The remainder, women mostly, old and young, although there were one or two elderly men among them, sat on hard upright chairs round the coffin, dressed in their best clothes, the women reciting the rosary, counting the decades of the Aves, the Ave Marias, on their beads, sometimes at the conclusion of a whole fifteen of them stopping to recount some edifying anecdotes about Nunča Pahorča who had always been very devout, sometimes to the distraction of her husband. They talked about how she had never missed going to mass and benediction and how she used to tick off the acolytes for picking their noses or otherwise misbehaving themselves during the celebration while the priest’s back was turned. And once they sang a Slovene song, which was one of her favourites, and which began:
| Tam cĕz jezero | There, over the lake, |
| dol na gmajničo | Down in the meadows |