by Noah Gordon
“There are four villages along the high pass at which you may seek food and shelter,” the man said. “You should stop at each one for the night, even though there may still be a few hours of light that would allow walking, for outside of the villages there is neither food nor protected places to sleep. The only segment of the pass over which you must hurry, to avoid being caught in darkness, is the long walk leading to the fourth village.”
The farmer told Josep that the high pass would bring him into Spain far to the east of Aragon. “You should be safe from Carlist militiamen, though fighters in red berets move deep into the Spanish army’s territory now and again. Last July they went all the way to Alpens and killed 800 Spanish soldiers,” he said. He looked at Josep. “Are you involved in that disagreement, by chance?” he asked carefully.
Josep was tempted to tell him he had almost worn the red beret himself, but he shook his head. “No.”
“That’s good sense. Jésus, you Spanish couldn’t have more terrible enemies than when you fight each other,” he said, and Josep was tempted to take offense but, after all, wasn’t it true? He contented himself to say that civil war was hard.
“What is all the killing about?” the man asked, and Josep found himself giving this farmer a lesson in Spanish history. How, for a long time, only royal first sons had been allowed to inherit the Spanish monarchy. How, before Josep had been born, King Fernando VII, having watched three of his wives die without a babe, was given two daughters in succession by his fourth wife, and persuaded the Cortes to change the law in order to name his first-born, Isabella, as the future queen. This had made piss-mad his younger brother, the infante Carlos Maria Isidro, who would have inherited the kingdom from Fernando.
How Carlos had rebelled and fled into France, while in Spain his conservative followers had joined together to form an armed militia that had been fighting ever since.
What Josep didn’t say was that the struggle had caused him to flee from Spain himself and had cost him four years of his life.
“I don’t give a damn whose royal cul covers the throne,” he said bitterly.
“Oh, aye, what good does it do a sensible common man to fret about such things?” the farmer said, and he sold Josep a small ball of cheese made from cow’s milk at a very good price.
When he began to walk through the Pyranees, the high pass turned out to be little more than a narrow, twisty path that rose and fell, rose and fell. He was a mote in unending vastness. The mountains stretched before him, wild and real, sharp brown peaks with white caps, fading into blue well before the horizon. There were sparse forests of pine, interspersed with naked cliffs, tumbled rocks, contorted earth. Sometimes at an elevated height he stopped and stared, dreamlike, at a stunningly revealed vista. He feared bears and wild pigs but met no animals; once, far-off, he saw two groups of deer.
The first village he came to was no more than a tiny cluster of houses. Josep paid a coin to sleep on the floor of a goatherd’s hut, next to the fire. He spent a miserable night because of tiny black vermin, bugs that supped on him at their leisure. The next day, he scratched a dozen itchy spots as he walked.
The second and third mountain villages were larger and better. He slept one night near a kitchen stove, and the next night on a workbench in a cobbler’s shop, bugless and with the rich, strong scent of leather in his nostrils.
He started out early and energetically on the fourth morning, conscious of the warning the farmer had given him. In places the trail was difficult to walk but, as the man had said, only a short section, the highest point, was covered by snow. Josep wasn’t accustomed to snow and didn’t like it. He could imagine breaking a leg and freezing to death or starving in the awful white expanse. Standing in the snow, he made a single chill meal of his hoarded cheese, eating it all as if he were already starving, letting each precious bite melt slowly and deliciously in his mouth. But he neither starved nor broke a leg; the shallow snow slowed him but wasn’t a hardship.
It seemed to him that the blue mountains would march before him forever.
He didn’t see his enemies, the Carlists in their red hats.
He didn’t see his enemies, the government troops.
He saw neither any Frenchman nor any Spaniard, and he had no idea where the border was located.
He was still marching through the Pyrenees like an ant alone in the world, tired and anxious, when the daylight began to fail. But before darkness he came to a village where old men sat on a bench in front of an inn, and two youths threw a stick for a skinny yellow dog that didn’t move. “Go after it, you lazy cunt,” one of them called. The words were in Josep’s kind of Catalan, and he knew he was close to Spain.
2
The Sign
Seven days later, early on a Sunday morning, Josep reached the village of Santa Eulália, where he could have walked safely in the dark, knowing every field, every farmhouse, each tree. It appeared to be unchanged. Crossing the little wooden bridge over the Pedregós River, he noted the thinness of the trickle through the riverbed, the result of half a dozen years of drought. He went down the narrow street and through the tiny placa bordered by the village well, the communal wine press, the blacksmith’s forge, the grocery of his father’s friend, Nivaldo, and the church whose patron saint shared its name with the village. He met no one, although some people already were in the Santa Eulália Church; when he passed, he heard the quiet rumble of their voices at the Mass. Beyond the church were a few houses and the vegetable farm of the Casals family. Then, Freixa’s vineyard. After Freixa’s, Roca’s vineyard. And finally Josep reached the vineyard of his father, nestled between the Fortuny family’s white grape vineyard and Quim Torras’s plantings of black grapes.
A small wooden sign on a low stake had been hammered into the ground.
FOR SALE
“Ah, Donat,” he said bitterly. He might have guessed his brother would not want to keep the land. He didn’t become angry until he saw the condition of the vineyard, for the vines were in sorry shape. They hadn’t been pruned and were overgrown and sprawling, all the neglected spaces between the vines rampant with grass, thistle, and weed.
The masia almost surely had not changed in appearance since it had been built by Josep’s great-grandfather. It was part of the land, a small building of stones and clay that seemed to grow out of the earth, with the kitchen and a little pantry on the ground floor, and stone stairways leading to two small bedrooms on the second floor and an attic where grains were stored under the eaves. There was an earthen floor in the kitchen, and the upstairs floor was plastered, the plaster stained deep red with pig’s blood and waxed regularly through all the years until now it seemed like dark, polished stone. All the ceilings had exposed rafters, logs taken from trees felled by José Alvarez when he had cleared his land to put in vines, and the roof was made of tall hollow reeds that grew on the river banks. Split and woven, they made a strong support for the roof tiles fashioned from gray river clay.
Inside, there was grit everywhere. On the kitchen mantle, the mahogany-cased French clock—his father’s wedding gift to Josep’s mother when they had married on December 12, 1848—sat silent and unwound. The only other things in the house that Josep valued were his father’s bedstead and trunk; both had been decorated with elaborate carvings of grapevines by their creator, his grandfather, Enric Alvarez. Now the carvings were gray with dust. Soiled work clothing lay on the floor and on the roughly made chairs and table, next to dirty dishes that contained mouse speckles and the remnants of old meals. Josep had been walking for days on end and was too weary for thought or act. Upstairs, it didn’t occur to him to use his father’s room, his father’s bed. He kicked off his shoes, dropped onto the thin, lumpy sleeping mat his body hadn’t touched for four years, and almost immediately knew nothing.
He slept through that day and the night, awakening late the next morning with a terrible hunger. There was no sign of Donat. Josep had only enough water left in his bottle for a swallow. When he carri
ed an empty basket and a pail toward the placa, the alcalde’s three sons were in Angel Casal’s field. The two older ones, Tonio and Jaume, were spreading manure and the third, the youngest one—Josep couldn’t remember his name—was plowing with a mule. Working, they didn’t take notice as he passed them and went to the grocery. In the gloom within the small shop was Nivaldo Machado, almost but not quite the same as Josep had remembered. He was skinnier if that was possible, and balder; the hair that remained had turned more completely grey. He was pouring beans from a large sack into small bags, and he stopped and stared with his good eye. The bad eye, the left one, was half shut.
“Josep? Praise be to God! Josep, you’re alive! Damn my soul, is it you, Tigre?” he said, using the nickname he, and only he, had used all of Josep’s life.
Josep was warmed by the joy in his voice, moved by tears in Nivaldo’s eyes. The leathery lips gave two kisses, the wiry old arms wrapped him in abracada.
“It’s me, Nivaldo. How are you?”
“I’m fine as ever. Are you still a soldier? We all thought you were dead, for certain. Were you wounded? Did you kill half the army of Spain?”
“The army of Spain and the Carlists have both been safe from me, Nivaldo. I haven’t been a soldier. I’ve been making wine in France. In Languedoc.”
“Truly, in Languedoc? How was it there?”
“Very French. The food was fine. Right now, I’m half starved, Nivaldo.”
Nivaldo smiled, visibly happy. The old man threw two sticks on the fire and set the stewpot on the small stove. “Sit.”
Josep took one of the two rickety chairs as Nivaldo set two cups on the tiny table and poured from a pitcher. “Salud. Welcome back.”
“Thank you. Salud.”
Not so bad, Josep told himself as he drank the wine. Well…as thin and sour and harsh as he remembered, yet comfortingly familiar.
“It’s your father’s wine.”
“Yes… How did he die, Nivaldo?”
“Marcel just…seemed to become very tired, his last few months. Then one evening we were sitting right here, playing draughts. He got a pain in his arm. He waited until he won the game and then said he was going home. He must have dropped dead on the way. Donat found him in the road.”
Josep nodded soberly, drank his wine. “Donat. Where is Donat?”
“Barcelona.”
“What is he doing there?”
“Lives there. Married. He took a woman he met where they both work, in one of the textile mills.” Nivaldo looked at him. “Your father always said that when the time came, Donat would accept his responsibilities in the vineyard. Well, the time came, but Donat doesn’t want the vineyard, Josep. You know he never liked that kind of work.”
The smell of the heating stew made Josep swallow. “So, what’s she like? The woman he married?”
“A nice enough female. Her name is Rosa Sert. What can a man tell about another man’s woman, just by looking? Quiet, a little homely. She came here with him several times.”
“He’s really serious about selling?”
“He wants money.” Nivaldo shrugged. “A body feels the lack of money when he takes a wife.” He took the pot from the stove, lifted off the cover, and spooned a generous portion of stew onto the plate. By the time he served a hunk of bread and added wine to the glasses, Josep was already shoveling food into his mouth, tasting black beans, sausage, lots of garlic. If it were summer, there would have been green beans, eggplant, perhaps kohlrabi. But now there was a taste of ham, bits of stringy rabbit, onions, potato. It was said that Nivaldo rarely washed out the stew pot, because as its contents shrank, new ingredients found their way into the stew.
He emptied his plate and accepted a second helping. “Is anyone interested in buying?”
“Always there are a few people interested in land. Roca would kill for it, but there is no chance he can manage to buy. Same for most of the others—there is no money at all. But Angel Casals wants land for his son Tonio.”
“The alcalde? But Tonio is his first-born!”
“He is a slave to brandy, drunk much of the time. Angel can’t get along with him and doesn’t trust him to take over the farm. The two younger boys are good workers. He will leave everything to them, and he seeks to find land for Tonio.”
“Has he made an offer?”
“Not yet. Angel is waiting, letting Donat sweat so he can steal the land at the best price. Angel Casals is the only one I know who can afford to set up a son with bought land. This village goes from poor to poorest. All of the younger sons leave to live elsewhere, same as you did. None of your friends are still here.”
“Manel Calderon?” he asked casually.
“No. I have not heard a word about him for four years, either,” Nivaldo said, and Josep felt a familiar fear.
“Guillem Parera?” he said, naming the member of the hunting group who had been his closest friend.
“Shit, Josep. Guillem is dead.”
Dead? “Ah, no.”
I told you. You should have stayed with me, you fucking Guillem.
“Are you all right, Tigre?” Nivaldo said sharply.
“What happened to him?” he asked, afraid to hear the answer.
“After he went with you and the others, evidently he left the army too. We heard he turned up in Valencia and found work repairing the cathedral, moving those big stone blocks. One slipped and crushed him to death.”
“Oh…A bad way to die.”
“Yes. A dying world, my young friend.”
Crist, poor Guillem. Nervous and depressed, Josep stood finally. “I need beans, rice. Chorizo—a great big hunk, Nivaldo, if you please. And oil and lard.” The old man got the items together for him and threw a small cabbage into the basket as a welcoming gift. He never charged anyone for stew or wine, so Josep added a few coins to the bill when he paid. It was the way things were done with Nivaldo.
He couldn’t help himself. “Is Teresa Gallego still here?”
“No. She made a marriage a couple of years ago, to a shoe repairer, Luis…Montres, Mondres…something like that, a cousin of the Calderons, who came to the village from Salamanca for a long visit. He wore a white suit at the wedding and speaks Spanish like a Portugués. He took her away to Barcelona, where he has a cobbler’s shop on Sant Doménech del Call.”
His fear realized, Josep nodded, tasting the bitterness of regret. He folded his dream of Teresa and put it away.
“You remember Maria del Mar Orriols?” Nivaldo said.
“Jordi Arnau’s girl?” “Yes. He left her with a big belly when he went off with your lot. She bore a little boy, Francesc, he’s called. Later, she married your neighbor, Ferran Valls, who gave the child his name.”
“Ferran?” Older, quiet man. Short, wide body, big head. Widower, no children.
“He’s dead too, Ferran Valls. Cut his hand and was carried off fast by the fever, less than a year after they married.”
“How does she live?”
“Valls’ vineyard is Maria del Mar’s now. For a time last year Tonio Casals lived with her. Some feared they’d marry, but she soon realized he’s mean as a snake when he drinks—and he always drinks. She drove him off. She and her boy keep to themselves. She works hard, tends the land as if she’s a man. Raises grapes and sells wine to become vinegar, same as everybody else,” Nivaldo said.
Nivaldo looked at him. “I once walked away from soldiering, too. Do you want to talk about what happened to you?”
“No.”
“It’s all changed, there in Madrid, but not as your father and I had hoped… We put you on the horse that didn’t win,” Nivaldo said heavily.
“Is there anything I can do to welcome you home?”
“I can use another bowl of stew,” Josep said, and the old man smiled and got up to get it for him.
Josep went to the churchyard and found the grave where Nivaldo said it was. There had been no room for his father next to where his mother lay. Her grave looked the same.
Wife and Mother
2 January 1835–20 May 1860
His father had been buried off to one side, in the southeast corner just left of the cherry tree. Each year the cherries on that tree were large, purple temptations. The villagers avoided the fruit, fearing it had been nurtured by the corpses in the graves, but his father and Nivaldo always had picked the cherries.
The earth of his father’s grave had had time to settle but still was bare of grass. Josep grieved, pulling the few weeds almost absent-mindedly. If he had been at the grave of Guillem he might have spoken to his old friend, but he felt no connection to either of his dead parents in this churchyard. He had been eight years old when his mother died, and he realized that he and his father never had found meaningful words to say to one another.
His father’s grave had no marker. He would have to make one.
Eventually he left the churchyard and went back to the placa. He tied his pail to the rope and dropped it into the well, noting the interval before he heard the splash. As he had seen from the river, the water level was low. When he had recovered the brimming pail, he drank deeply from it and then filled it again and carried it home with care to store in the two cántirs, the water jugs that would keep it cool.
This time, as he walked past the alcalde’s field, his presence was noted. Tonio and Jaume stopped what they were doing and stared. Jaume lifted a hand to him. Josep’s hands were occupied with the basket and the pail, but he shouted a cheerful hola! in greeting. In a few minutes, when he set down the pail to flex his cramped hand, he looked back and saw that the youngest Casals brother—the boy’s name was Jordi, he remembered suddenly—had been sent to follow him to ascertain that he was indeed Josep Alvarez, come home.
When he reached the Alvarez masia, he set the basket and the pail on the ground. The wooden FOR SALE sign came out of the dry ground easily, and he whirled it overhead before letting it fly into a deep clump of brush.
