Homes

I've just heard from a friend who's been made temporarily homeless for absurd legal reasons in England. Which makes Jesus' General's typically acerbic take on the McCain housing problem all the more pertinent, albeit obliquely. You can read it here.

The house above the cork forest (5)

I admit it. I've been putting this off.

At the end of my last post about the house, Joost wanted closure. We all did.

When it came, or appeared to have come--when finally, after more than a year of delays and bureaucratic procrastination and sheer bloody-mindedness from one of the four brothers, who was never actually present but appeared to want more money, although that was never quite said, merely implied, with raised eyebrows and sighs and muttering, the papers appeared to be in order--when finally , after much vagueness and postponement and shrugging and looking towards the horizon, the price appeared to be established at a figure only slightly higher than Joost was officially prepared to pay--when finally, after a series of veiled threats by the neighbour with hole-made wine and woolly salami, the issue of the shared road appeared to have been settled and Joost had been convinced by my lawyer and E.'s lawyer and a third lawyer belonging, I think, to the surveyor that he would automatically acquire the right to use it as part of the purchase--when finally all this was settled and Joost bought the house...

I'll save the next part for when I'm feeling stronger.

The house above the cork forest (4)

Things go from bad to worse. It turns out that the land attached to the house is surrounded by common land, the boundaries of which are time-honoured but undefined. There seems to be a goat path running along the north-eastern edge and curving down to the well, which doesn't belong to the house but to anyone who wants to use it. It will pass across the area Joost plans to pave and convert into a patio. What do you mean? he says. Anyone? He can't believe it. He wants to know exactly where the lines are drawn. E. shrugs and tells me to explain that it doesn't matter, if it's common land it's as much his as anyone else's. Besides, once he's bought the house he can get the boundaries sorted out. Or ignore them. He can even buy the right to the common land. Everything can be done as soon as he's bought the house. He has to buy the house. But Joost shakes his head. He wants to know exactly where the lines are drawn.

Afternoons are spent with pots of paint, the four old men leaving strings of conflicting red blobs on stones, the trunks of trees, odd clumps of grass, like join-up-the dot drawings drawn on a giant scale. Joost looks around him with a sort of weary unbelieving desperation. Inside the house, the rain has started to coat the upper floors in mould. He's holding his little map still, now covered with pencilled lines, but nobody's interested in the map. Even the surveyor, who drew the thing, seems to regard it as an object of little value, as though it were less reliable than hearsay. He nods when Alessandro, or one of his brothers, starts to talk about a stream that's no longer there, as though its ghostly presence were still decisive. What stream? says Joost.

Joost sends me emails at the rate of five or six a week, from all over the world. Buenos Aires, Lisbon, Prague. But wherever his body is, in whichever international hotel or airport or sushi bar, his mind is on the house above the cork forest. He wants us to set up meetings with the vendors, their immediate relatives, their neighbours. He wants to know how much it would cost to have a certain kind of window shutter. He wants new maps drawn up and faxed.

He wants closure. And who can blame him?

The house above the cork forest (3)

It should have been so easy. Of course house-buying is more complicated in Italy than elsewhere, by which I suppose I mean northern Europe, as Joost, our Dutch friend, certainly did. But we'd been through it ourselves, twice, friends had bought houses in Fondi and Rome and Milan, it hadn't been that exhaustingly complex, just long-winded. When E. said two or three months at the most, we added one on for luck. Done deal by Christmas, we thought.

The house is flanked on one side by a place for parking cars and on the other three by unfenced land, peppered with olive and fig and pomegranate and vines that produce small strawberry-flavoured grapes with hard skins, and harder rocks heaving up through the rough grey-green grass. There's the well I mentioned earlier, round and hatted, like a relic from a stone age settlement, and a stone-built oven, and the roofless remains of what might have been a stable for a mule, also in stone. Joost and Anna wanted to know what came with the house. The owners smiled and nodded and shook their heads, worryingly not in unison. One of the brothers, the oldest, said the well was his and then said that it wasn't, and then said that it was but that he didn't want to sell it. Each time we went the putative boundaries changed.

This kept us busy for a good six months. Land register maps seemed to offer a solution until we tried to establish how they actually corresponded to the land itself. Goitrous Alessandro, the one who may have owned the well, glanced at our map upside down for a moment then brushed it away with a beatific smile and began to clamber onto the top of a rock, waving his stick towards the road below. Da qua a la, he insisted, while Joost stared hopelessly at the map and Anna gathered figs.

The neighbours, who may be related to the owners, asked us in for their home-made wine and salami, pouring the former into jam jars rinsed in a bucket, slicing the latter against a wool-clad bosom. As we drove past their barn on the way back to the road we saw the head and forelegs of a dead dog sticking out from the straw, like a trophy on a wall. It was still there two weeks later.

The house above the cork forest (2)

We had a phone call from Joost, our friend's friend/colleague, who'd seen photographs of the house and wanted to know more. He's Dutch, a director of photography; he's done scores of TV ads and even features. He'd been in touch before this, phoning from various corners of the world but what he was looking for - a derelict convent in the wilds of Lazio, with all its original features bar nuns, for the price of a council flat in Dudley- was simply unobtainable and, rudely, we'd not replied.

But this time he'd seen the photos. He loved the look of the place, he came, and saw, and was conquered. He came a second time, with his girlfriend, who saw and was conquered too. It all seemed so simple. They walked round the house, the land; they found a well, hidden by olives,beneath a cap of skilfully laid stones, like a beehive, with a dark live snake in the water.

The owners - four brothers, one with wife, had brought a Thermos filled with sweetened coffee to seal the deal. We stood in a circle and smiled, shook hands, drank the coffee and handed back the little cups to the signora, who packed them into her bag. That was September 2005. E. said the papers would be ready by October, early November.

The house above the cork forest

Four houses really, each one a three floored tower attached on two sides to the rest of the building, so that cut across the house would look like a slice of that neapolitan ice cream you used to be able to buy or, better, of angel cake, if that's what it was called, four pastel blocks of sponge inside an icing shell. We were taken to see it the first time by E., since christened Zanzara (Mosquito), less for his sting than his ubiquity, it must be three years ago by now, and we wanted it for us or someone we knew, anyone would do. We wanted to keep it in the family.

It's a beautiful house, for what it is - just-worked honey-coloured stone - and for where it is, built on the side of the hill, with cork trees filling the valley below and bare rocks above, and a cave where a shot-down Greek pilot lived during WW2, or part of it, succoured by the local people according to the owners of the house, four aged brothers who pop up as soon as a car approaches the drive. This may be true. It's more or less where La Ciociara was set, after all, and Moravia knew a thing or two about the Resistance.

We showed it to friends, who liked it but not enough, who spoke to friends, who liked it enough, who fell in love with it, as people say about houses they want to live in. They decided to buy it in September 2005. E. swore to us that the papers were in order, and we believed him.

This is the first instalment of a long and enervating tale...