The Vintners Luck

by Elizabeth Knox

  ‘When I found Léon hanging I took only what accused me. I defied Sobran to speak to me about my unfaithfulness – he wasn’t faithful to me. I’ve forgiven him that. Léon Jodeau was another kind of traitor. He couldn’t be true to what he knew about himself.’ Céleste brushed at her dress. Her tone, phrase by phrase, was self-excusing, remote, gloating. ‘He liked me to put my hands around his throat and choke him.’ She put up her hands to show the angel, clenched and flexed them in the air. ‘Aline Lizet had taken my husband once when she was only a girl – bewitched him. I know that. Then she meant to have Léon. She –’ Céleste’s voice was now stiff with pride – ‘wouldn’t have known how to handle him. Even after Aline was dead I was able to have Léon. Even when he said he hated me.’

  She took a deep breath and stared into Xas’s eyes. ‘Angel of God, I didn’t show Léon’s letter to Sobran not because I was afraid of what he would do to punish me, or to spare him pain, but because I didn’t want him to share his trouble, or halve it, with the Baroness.’ She nodded slowly, as though expecting him to join her by saying, ‘I understand.’ Then she gave herself a little shake, pursed her lips, stretched her eyelids in a girlish expression of I’m-all-innocence. ‘Now, you should do what you promised him you would,’ Céleste reminded Xas.

  The angel put his face down to feel for breath – thought he felt something steamy stir the small hairs on his cheek. He placed one hand over Sobran’s mouth and pinched his nose closed.

  There was no sign, no struggle. After several minutes Xas let go and saw that Sobran’s nostrils had retained the white pressure marks of his pinching fingers.

  Céleste stood, pressed her hands into the small of her back and arched. ‘There is plenty of light to see by. He’d better have the lamp – he and you. You watch. I’ll go and sit in the house till five, then wake my sons.’

  Madame Jodeau went down the slope, made her way carefully, but unassisted by a stick. She came out of the vineyard and went into the house. The low light in one room brightened. Xas turned to the lost page of Léon’s letter.

  – and the inspiration of her death. God help me. For five years under your roof and your protection I have betrayed you with your wife. There was a time when as any other indecent but ordinary erring man I would have pleaded clemency for Céleste for her betrayal of your mutual vow. I cannot beg for her now though I must acknowledge that there were times when she seemed to know me so thoroughly and be so easy in her mind that I allowed myself to imagine that you had guessed everything and permitted everything. This is my worst sin – the sinuous hypocrisy of my reasoning. Céleste isn’t sane, so I am doubly to blame for the suffering she still struggles against so strenuously and so murderously. I meant to finish with Céleste as my love for Aline Lizet grew. But she would not let me. Aline was murdered in the same manner as the poor girls I killed. I supposed like a madman that this was some judgement of God. Céleste meant to be a consolation to me after Aline’s death. I tried to resist renewing our affair and last night in the Inn at Aluze, Céleste, in a rage with me, told me that it was she who killed Aline. I cannot tell you any of this and live. It doesn’t please me to have her hurt me any more. She guessed my guilt because she knew my weakness. I can’t live with my life in her hands. I am sorry, Sobran.

  Xas closed his hand on the hot glass chimney of the lamp. He took it off and held the page to the flame. The ink flared green and iridescent, as the page was consumed. The angel dropped the black flake as its last corner caught fire. He wiped his hand before putting his palm down to smooth his friend’s thin, white hair.

  After a minute he got up and turned to face the road. He stood under the shade tree and listened to a dog bark and a train whistle.

  1997 Château Vully l’Ange du Cru Jodeau

  It’s a lovely day, at the height of the tourist season, and the three English who have come by car eye the group gathered in a strip of shade beside an air-conditioned bus. Some wine tour from the South Pacific – beefy, tanned, expansive people who seem to have a clue or two about the vineyard. Their driver talks to the tour guide, an employee of the château. They are expected, she’ll take them through now, first the tour, then the tasting, and then they can carry some wine away to Lateron, the restaurant at Aluze.

  The Englishman asks whether he and his friends can join the New Zealanders. ‘Yes, all at once, why not?’ the tour guide says, then flicks her eyebrows and gestures, ‘You too, come here,’ at the young man in dark glasses leaning against the door of his dusty Renault – a rental. He is another tourist, she thinks, so keeps her foot light on the gas of her French.

  On the walled walk the finest grade of gravel is loud underfoot, but when the tourists pause they can hear the bees in the lavender and flowering thyme. The arched gates in the walls give onto the vine rows, shallow slopes that rise on either side of the château’s buildings, like furled wings.

  A picture of order in ancient cultivation.

  As they go, the tour guide tells them about Phylloxera vastatrix, the vine louse that devastated the vineyards of Europe between 1863 and 1890. The vines here were grafted onto American root stock in the 1870s. Only the vine stock of its Grand Cru was spared – just one walled vineyard between Macon and Chagny, Clos Jodeau, which lies three miles south of Vully.

  She conducts the tourists into the cool cuverie to show them the old oak presses and copper fermentation vats. One tourist, used to the stainless fermentation cellars of his own vineyard in Hawke’s Bay, points at the grape-pulp, caked and dry like wasps’ nests, above one vat.

  ‘Since when was wine all about hygiene?’ the tour guide tells him, light as a wasp. ‘Remember those bare feet treading the grapes.’ She is annoyed to see that the young man in dark glasses – still in dark glasses indoors – has his head back to peer at the ceiling above the vat. A health-inspector type. American, perhaps.

  I am looking up at the panels of the high ceiling of the cuverie that I know form the floor of another room above, a room with a low ceiling. I am looking at everything. There is a work in the Pompidou Centre entitled just that: Everything. Tutto, by Alighiero Boetti. A meticulously embroidered mosaic of animals and artefacts in many colours, where the border of every shape meets that of another, and all the spaces are shapes, each recognisable: lamp stands, guitars, traffic lights, deer, trains, swallows, hammers – everything. A perfect puzzle, a jigsaw of the world with each thing beside another, nothing beside itself, and not one thing broken.

  We walk into the cellars through a new door, an enlargement of a hole used to hide Allied airmen during the war, the tour guide tells us. She takes us along the long ranks of barrels, where Vully’s two Premiers Crus mature, as still as sphinxes. The barrels, she says, are not new, for Vully doesn’t hold with over-oaked wine. Some were new in 1970, but ‘the angels’ of the château’s Grand Cru are original.

  In 1931 I was working in Germany. I was in charge of the fire in the film Kameradschaft. An explosion in the mine – a fire that broke through a mortared stone wall, dragon’s breath, its steady, muffled roar going on after the engineer’s quenched screams. Well – that’s how it plays. Of course, there was no one in the flame-filled shaft but me, in a protective suit, pumping kerosene. For almost three decades I’d watched films, but Kameradschaft was the first time I’d looked at anything over the camera’s shoulder, looked at artifice in its true colours; then through the camera’s eye, when my first shot was set up; then afterwards, at a screening. And, despite my faithful and unfading memory, I found myself regretting you – your voice, face, gestures – as lost evidence. Why remember, when I had nothing to show for it? Now, my fire is as grey as the faces of the actors and extras I knew. That monochrome radiance, the fire’s speedy, repeating tumescence, was the best we could do – the most I could want.

  There were two things I didn’t tell you.

  When my beekeeper monk died, I discovered I couldn’t do without him. I sat by his hives in the humpy meadow and ached with sorrow. I wondered wh
ether angels got ill, I found myself rocking out stiffness I couldn’t possibly feel. Then I flew to Heaven and found him. Or – I found his soul, and it wasn’t the same thing. Niall’s soul had his liveliness, the vitality that had been worn away in the remote old man he had become. But Niall’s soul wasn’t Niall. Lucifer wanted to know why I thought this was. He’d never troubled himself to get to know a human, so had no basis for comparison. When I said I didn’t understand or have any ideas he tried a theory. Lucifer has theories. What God makes are copies and distillations. A soul is a distilled human. Earth and purgatory are distilleries. My Niall and your Nicolette became blissful distillations, not themselves, if Lucifer is to be believed.

  I believe him. I’ll never see you again.

  We walk out of the fermentation cellar and around, the easy way, the tour guide says, to the new cellar. ‘New, 1770 or so.’ The women sigh at a stand of hollyhocks in a sheltered corner. Where Aurora had a lily pond is a rectangular flowerbed, and a pump smothered in red clematis. We go down the steps into the cool cellar. The tour guide poses between ‘the angels’ and tells her tales of the only Grand Cru of the Chalonnais, legends of its provenance, and of the bundles the cooper claimed M. Jodeau, Vully’s vintner, hid in each barrel.

  I lied about my other visit to Heaven. God did answer my question. I asked why I looked like Christ and God answered, ‘Because you are a copy of Him.’

  How could I be, wasn’t I older than Him?

  ‘I knew about Him from the beginning,’ God said. ‘I made my copy before He was born – wanting to see what He would do if He didn’t do His duty.’

  ‘Did Lucifer know?’

  ‘Not until he came to Earth to – as he puts it – reason with my Son. Lucifer was thrown by the likeness and made a poor job of his pitch. That was also my intention. My Son needed an element of surprise. By that time I had some knowledge of His susceptibilities – I’d been watching you. After this encounter Lucifer told me, in a great rage, that he was going to kill you, and that our bargain was off. But when he went to kill you he found you planting your garden.’

  I remember. Lucifer found me in my open black glass dome, standing in a paste of sand, and covered with the spores of various mosses. I hadn’t spoken to the archangel since he’d ‘signed’ me. I said to him, nervously, that I was going to make a garden. He seemed perplexed and stared at me for a long time in silence. Finally, sounding amused, he said, ‘Don’t you mean rather that you are going to try to make a garden.’

  ‘Yes, try,’ I said.

  ‘All right,’ he said.

  God and His copies and extractions, His improved editions, His finer things. In His world it is as though there are no particular things – or the particularity of each thing depends upon another. So hollyhocks smell like watermelon or watermelon like hollyhocks. And there is a taste in some good but perishable sparkling wine that is like the bindings of books printed between 1890 and 1920, perhaps some chemical in the glue. This hateful phenomenon of likeness is more than the meanings made by human minds – that old conspiracy of significance – it is evidence, the pollution of God’s plan.

  If I hadn’t withheld these thoughts from you, would you have gone to Heaven carrying your knowledge like an infection, one of those improving infections, like the flor that makes yellow wine yellow? The tour guide walks away from ‘the angels’. She turns her body into a signpost, directs us into ‘the eastern transept’. That old joke. ‘Monsieur, s’il vous plaît …’ She tells me not to lean on the barrel. A wing at my back, a wing behind the wood. ‘If you please,’ she says. I move on.

  You fainted and I caught you. It was the first time I’d supported a human. You had such heavy bones. I put myself between you and gravity. Impossible.

  D