Elena told me that the olive, the Olea europaea in the nomenclature Linnaeus fixed in 1753 and that no one has ever contested since because the olive is one of those plants whose taxonomic identity has generated no disputes, unlike for instance the pistachio or certain varieties of prunus that get reclassified every decade, had been cultivated for six thousand years without anyone ever feeling the need to store its seeds in an underground vault carved into the rock of an island in the Arctic Circle, because the olive was the Mediterranean itself, Elena told me in the voice of someone stating a fact that admits no discussion, the olive was the terraced slopes of the Ligurian coast and the dry stone walls of the south and the inland hills where every family owned at least three trees and called them by name the way you call dogs or children by name, and every variety had a name that was a proper name, Cellina di Nardò, Ogliarola del Gargano, Cima di Melfi, Bella di Cerignola, Carolea, Ottobratica, Tonda Iblea, names that contained the place of origin and that without that place meant nothing, because a Cellina di Nardò grown elsewhere was no longer a Cellina di Nardò in the sense the word held for the farmers who had selected it over centuries, it was just an olive tree with a label that no longer corresponded to anything. Elena had worked in the university's plant genetics department for eleven years, she told me, and in eleven years she had prepared deposits for twenty-three varieties of durum wheat, for eighteen legumes native to the Mediterranean basin, for seven grape varieties at risk of disappearing, but not for the olive, never for the olive, because the olive did not need to be preserved, the olive was everywhere, the olive was the plant that did not end.

Then she had seen the data on Xylella. Xylella fastidiosa subspecies pauca, Elena explained to me with the precision of someone who has read every single phytosanitary report published between 2013 and 2025, with the same cadence she would have used to list the entries of an inventory or the stations on a rail line, had probably arrived from Costa Rica through an ornamental coffee plant imported to a nursery in the Salento, and from that nursery had spread carried by the meadow spittlebug, the Philaenus spumarius, a twelve-millimeter insect no one had ever considered a dangerous vector, and now it carried inside itself a bacterium that blocked the xylem vessels of the olive until it died, and in twelve years it had killed twenty-one million in the Puglia region alone, twenty-one million, Elena repeated, and I tried to imagine twenty-one million dead trees and could not because a number like that cannot be imagined, it can be noted, read in a column of a spreadsheet, accepted as data. The most affected varieties were the Ogliarola and the Cellina, the ones with proper names that contained the place in the name, and now the place contained them only as firewood, because an olive tree killed by Xylella dries standing and stays standing for years like an involuntary monument to itself until someone cuts it down to make room for a resistant cultivar, the Leccino or the Favolosa, if there is room, if there is will, if there is money to replant.

Elena prepared the deposit proposal after reading the 2025 report, the one estimating the loss of sixty percent of Puglia's olive oil production compared to 2012, sixty percent in thirteen years, she told me, as though thirteen years were a measure of time enough to erase what six thousand years had built, and in fact they were, thirteen years had been enough. The counterargument was solid and she knew it well, she laid it out herself with the loyalty of someone who respects objections before surpassing them: six thousand years do not need a freezer, the olive grows across the entire Mediterranean basin, millions of trees, no one is cutting them down, Xylella is a regional problem not a threat to the entire species, and placing olive seeds in the Arctic vault meant admitting that nothing was permanent anymore, that six thousand years of survival did not guarantee the six thousand and first. Elena told me the argument was right about everything except one point: Xylella fastidiosa subspecies pauca did not exist in the Mediterranean six thousand years ago, did not exist a thousand years ago, did not exist twenty years ago. The permanence of the olive had been calculated in a world where that bacterium was absent, and that world had ended in 2013 in a nursery in the Salento with an ornamental coffee plant, and from that moment every past year of survival no longer counted as a guarantee of the next, because the conditions had changed and conditions do not reverse. She filled out the forms. Prepared fifty heat-sealed aluminum packets. Wrote the labels by hand before printing them, because she wanted to see the names in her own handwriting at least once, as a form of farewell: Frantoio, Leccino, Coratina, Carolea, Nocellara del Belice, Moraiolo, Taggiasca, Cellina di Nardò.

The label on packet number thirty-seven, the one for the Picual variety, which is not an Italian cultivar but Spanish and which Elena had included in the selection for taxonomic completeness, as she explained to me, because a deposit that does not represent the genetic diversity of the species across its full range is not a deposit but a partial collection, read: Olea europaea, var. Picual, collected March 2026, storage temperature minus eighteen degrees Celsius, and now that label sat on the shelf of corridor twelve of the vault carved into the mountain, into the rock of the island, in the dark, because the corridor lights came on only when someone entered and no one entered, and no one read the label because no one needed to read it, not yet, not now, and perhaps not ever, and the corridor was dark and cold and the packets waited aligned on the metal shelves and waiting was the function for which they had been brought there, the only function, to wait in the dark and the cold for someone to need them.