by Noah Gordon
Then he looked down the road and smiled to see young Jordi Casals fleeing like a panicked animal to tell his father and his brothers what he had witnessed.
3
Cleaning the Nest
The evidence of Donat’s slovenly housekeeping disgusted Josep, yet when he began to work, he was drawn not inside the casa but to the vineyard. He cleared weeds and pruned vines, the same tasks that had been his final work at the larger Mendes vineyard. What he had done well and with pride for wages in France, he resumed now with overwhelming pleasure on this small, scruffy piece of land that had belonged to his family for a hundred and eight years. Far back into the early days of Spanish agriculture, his people had been serfs and then day laborers in the crop fields of poverty-stricken Galicia. In the year 1766 things had changed for the Alvarez family when King Charles III had noted that much of the countryside consisted of fallow land without workers, while the villages were crowded with men without land—discontented and therefore politically dangerous. The king had appointed Conde Pedro Pablo de Aranda, a military leader who had distinguished himself as a Captain-General of the armies, to oversee a program of ambitious land reform, parceling and redistributing public lands as well as tracts that had come to the Crown through the purchase of extensive properties from the Catholic Church.
One of the first of these transactions involved 51 hectares of isolated, rolling hills on the Pedregós River in Catalonia. The land was empty of habitation, and Aranda had ordered it divided into 12 sections of four hectares each, with the remaining three hectares surrounding a small stone building, the long-abandoned Priory of Santa Eulália, which he designated as a church. To receive the land the Captain-General chose 12 retiring combat veterans, senior sergeants who had led troops under his command. As young soldiers all of them had fought in petty campaigns and bloody insurrections. Each of the sergeants was owed back pay, not huge amounts but a respectable sum when added together. Except for small allowances given to each new farmer so he could put in a first crop, the claims for back pay were settled by the land grants, a by-product of the program that pleased Aranda in a year of financial difficulty for the Crown.
Only one of the twelve tracts was truly outstanding for agricultural purposes. This good field was located in the southwest corner of the new village, on a former course of the river. For centuries, in the rare years of high water, swollen currents had collected topsoil upstream and deposited it at a crook in the river, building a thick cap of rich alluvial soil. The first grantee to inspect the new village had been Pere-Felip Casals, who had chosen the fertile corner eagerly and without hesitation, assuring the prosperity that had brought his descendents political power and made them, generation after generation, alcaldes of Santa Eulália.
Josep’s great-grandfather, José Alvarez, had been the fourth retired soldier to inspect Santa Eulália and accept his land. He had had dreams of becoming a prosperous wheat farmer, but he and the other sergeants, born peasants all, had knowledge of soils and had observed that every remaining tract was composed of slatey soil or dry limestone earth, a chalky, stony medium.
They had talked gravely and at length. Pere-Felip Casals had already started to plant potatoes and rye on his fertile piece. The others knew they would have to be resilient. “It isn’t possible for many crops to thrive in such inhospitable shit,” José Alvarez had said wearily, and the other sergeants had agreed.
From the very first planting, each of them had grown a crop that thrived in the burning sun of summer and renewed itself in the respite of the mild winter in northern Spain. A crop that could burrow deep into the dry, stony ground until its roots sucked and swallowed whatever meager moisture was held by the earth.
Each of them had planted grapes.
The land reform movement didn’t get far. The Crown soon decided to encourage a system that leased large tracts to tenants-in-chief, who in turn rented tiny bits of land to indigent farmers. In less than two years Aranda stopped giving away land, but the farmers of Santa Eulália had been given clear titles and were landowners.
Now, more than a century after the land grant, fewer than half the tracts in Santa Eulália were owned and operated by descendents of the retired soldiers. The other pieces had been sold to landlords and were tended by pagesos, peasant grape growers who leased tiny bits of land. The living conditions of owners and renters were scarcely different, but in addition to farming larger tracts, those who owned their vineyards were secure in the knowledge that no landlord could raise the rent and force them from their property. Weeding on his hands and knees, Josep dug his fingers into the warm pebbled clay, feeling its welcome grittiness under his nails. This earth. How wonderful to own it, from the sun-baked growing surface to however deep a man wanted to dig! It didn’t matter that this ground gave sour wine instead of wheat. To have it was to possess a slice of Spain, to own a piece of the world.
Late in the afternoon he moved inside and began to set the house to rights. He took the dirty dishes and utensils outside and scrubbed the filth and the mould from them, first with handfuls of sand and then with soapy water. He wound the French clock, checking the time from Nivaldo’s clock at the store and estimating the few minutes it took him to walk home. Then he swept the floor, the packed earth that had been polished by a century of Alvarez feet. Tomorrow, he told himself, he would scrub his clothes in the Pedregós, along with the soiled clothes Donat had abandoned. He was aware of his own body stink. The air wasn’t warm, but he needed the luxury of a full wash. When he returned the broom, he noticed that the wooden handles of the tools were dry, and he took the time to give them a careful oiling. Only then, as the sun was sinking, did he allow himself to take the thin bar of brown soap and make his way toward the river.
When he passed the Torras place, he saw that it was still tended, but poorly. The vines, many as yet unpruned, looked as if they sorely needed fertilizer.
The next vineyard was the one that had been Ferran Valls’s. Four large, twisted olive trees bordered the road, their old roots as thick as Josep’s arm. A little child was playing between the roots of the second tree.
The boy watched him as he approached. He was a handsome fellow, blue-eyed and dark-haired, with thin, knobby arms and legs that were browned by the sun. Josep saw that his hair was too long, almost as long as a girl’s.
He stopped and cleared his throat. “Good afternoon. I suppose you are Francesc. I am Josep.”
But the boy sprang to his feet and scuttled away behind the trees. He ran lopsided; there was something wrong with his legs. By the time Josep passed the last tree, allowing him to look deeper into the vineyard, he could see the child’s ragged progress toward a figure working in the rows with her hoe.
Maria del Mar Orriols. They had called her Marimar. The girl he recalled as Jordi’s lover, now a widow, he thought, feeling strange.
When the boy pointed, she stopped her activity and stared out at the man in the road. She looked stockier than he remembered, almost like a man except for the work-stained dress and the kerchief around her head. “Hola, Maria del Mar!” he called, but she made no reply; obviously, she didn’t recognize the figure in the road. He stopped and waited for a moment, but she didn’t walk forward to speak with him, nor did she give him any signal that would invite him to approach.
In a moment he waved and continued toward the river, and at the end of her property a curve in the road took him toward the bank of the Pedregós and out of her sight.
4
The Saint of Virgins
Everywhere he looked in Santa Eulália, Josep saw Teresa Gallego. There was one year’s difference in their ages. When they were little, Teresa was just another of the many children who ran about the village street and started working on the land while still very young. Her father, Eusebi Gallego, rented a hectare and made a questionable living raising white grapes. Josep had always seen her about, but she didn’t register in his consciousness, even in such a small village, until she was seven years old. Compact for her
age but quick and strong, she was the mascot of the Castellers of Santa Eulália. The young favorite of the community, she was the child everyone knew would have been chosen—if only she had been a male!—to be the peak of the human structure of castellers wearing green shirts and white pants, who on public occasions celebrated God and Catalonia by raising themselves toward the sky, standing on one another’s shoulders.
Some said the castellers reenacted Christ rising into heaven. While musicians played old songs on drums and traditional Catalan oboes called grallas, a quartet of barrel-chested strong men took their places. Wrapped in suffocatingly tight sashes to give support to their backs and bellies, they were surrounded by hundreds of eager volunteers, the crowd pressing in on them, propping them, holding them in place with dozens of hands to provide a firm baixos, a base. Four additional strong men climbed atop the bottom four, their bare feet on the lower men’s shoulders. Then four more climbed up, and four more on top of them. And so on, until there were eight layers of men, each layer lighter than the preceding one because it would have to bear less weight. The upper levels were youths, and the last to ascend the castell was the small boy who was the anxaneta, the pinnacle.
Little Teresa Gallego was strong and nimble as a monkey, by far a better climber than any boy in the village. She attended every practice of the castellers because her father, Eusebi, lent his invaluable strength in the fourth layer of men. Though a female could not be the pinnacle, little Teresa was admired and loved, and sometimes she was allowed to climb to the fifth row during rehearsals, over four bodies as if each were a ladder, stepping on calves, buttocks, backs, outstretched arms, and shoulders, until she stood on her father. She climbed carefully and smoothly, making no frantic moves that would cause the castell to sway, but often it swayed anyway and shuddered while she climbed. A quick escape command yelled from the coach below could send her sliding down again over all the backs and legs as the castell trembled and twisted. Once in a practice climb it broke beneath her, and she fell to earth, a small piece of human fruit dropping among the thudding, hard adult bodies. There were minor injuries from the fall, but God protected her from harm.
Though she was acknowledged to be the best child climber, when there were splendid times of public success during the castellers’ scheduled appearances at festivals, always it was a slower and less accomplished boy who clambered upward and achieved completion as the ninth layer, stepping across a final back to raise one arm in victory as he became the pinnacle, like the cherry on a tall layer cake, while the crowd cheered wildly. In those moments, Teresa stood on the firm earth and gazed upward in frustration and longing, as the music of the drums and the grallas sent shivers through her, and the entire human castell triumphantly unfolded itself earthward in victory and in perfect order, layer by layer.
She climbed in practice for only two years. By the middle of the second season her father began to show early signs of flagging health and had trouble carrying his weight in the tower. He was replaced and Teresa stopped going to the castellers’ drills. She became less cute as she grew older, and she stopped being everyone’s darling, but Josep continued to study her from afar.
He had no idea what made her so interesting. He watched her change from a child as she grew tall and strong. The year she turned sixteen she was small-breasted, but her body was womanly, and he began to stare when he thought he wasn’t noticed, gazing quickly at her legs when she tucked the hem of her skirt into her waistband to keep it from the vineyard dirt. She knew he was watching her, but they never spoke.
Then on Santa Eulália’s Day that year, they both found themselves by the blacksmith shop, watching the church procession.
There was controversy about the saint’s day, because there were two saints named Eulália—Santa Eulália, patron saint of Barcelona, and Santa Eulália of Merida—and people couldn’t agree from which of them the village took its name. Each of the saints was a martyr who had died in agony for her faith. The day of Eulália of Merida was December 10, but the village celebrated on February 12, the saint’s day observed by Barcelona, because they were closer to Barcelona than to Merida. Some of the villagers eventually merged the estimable powers of both saints in their minds, making their combined Santa Eulália more powerful than either of the other two. Their village’s Eulália was the patron saint of a number of things—rain, widows, fishermen, virginity, and the prevention of miscarriages. For most of the important problems of life, one could pray to Santa Eulália.
Fifty years earlier, residents of the village had noted that the remains of one of the Eulálias were entombed in the Barcelona Cathedral, while worshipers in Merida had relics of their Santa Eulália in the basilica of their church. The villagers of Santa Eulália had wanted to honor their saint too, but they had no relic, not even a single bone from a finger, and they pooled their meager funds and commissioned a statue of her for their church. The sculptor they hired was a maker of gravestones, a man of limited talent. The statue he made was large and cumbersome, with a disapproving face that was homely enough to be human, but the statue was painted in bright colors and the village was proud of it. Every Santa Eulália’s Day, the women dressed their saint in a white robe adorned with many bright-ringing little bells. The strongest men of the region, including those who served as the base of the human tower, would jostle the statue onto a square platform made of stout timbers. While the men at the front of the platform walked forward with grunts and groans, the men at the rear walked backward; they moved slowly and staggeringly from one end of the village to the other and then twice around the placa, the bells on the statue tinkling as if in saintly approval. Children and dogs chased each other in the platforms’s wake. Babies bawled, the dogs barked, and Santa Eulália’s progress was marked by a wave of applause and cries of pleasure from the crowds of people who had come in their church clothes, some of them from considerable distances, to join in the festivities and pay homage to the saint.
Josep was acutely aware of the girl near him. They stood without speaking, his eyes fixed determinedly at the building on the other side of the narrow street in order not to look at her. Perhaps she was as bewitched as he. Before they awoke to the fact that the saint approached, Eulália was almost upon them. The street was very narrow at that point. There were only a few centimeters of clearance on both sides of the saint’s platform, which sometimes ground alarmingly against the stone walls of buildings until the men carrying it could make the tiny correction needed for a clean passage.
Josep looked ahead and saw at once that beyond the blacksmith shop the street was wider but already was occupied by a crowd of onlookers.
“Senyoreta,” he said warningly, the only time he spoke to her.
In the wall of the blacksmith shop there was a shallow niche and, taking the girl by the arm, he pushed her into it and pressed in after her just as the platform reached them. Had they still been on the street, the ponderous weight would have crushed and ground. As it was, he could feel the edge of the platform move the fabric of his trousers at the back of his thighs. If the platform had been jostled, injury still might have occurred.
But he was scarcely conscious of the danger. He was pressed against the girl’s body—so close together—amazingly aware of every sensation.
For the first time he examined her face, at close range and without being forced to look away after two seconds. No one would ever mistake her for one of the world’s famous beauties, he told himself. Yet to him, somehow her face was better than that.
Her eyes were of ordinary size, a soft brown color; her lashes were long, her eyebrows heavy and dark. Her nose was small and straight with thin nostrils. Her lips were full and the upper lip was chapped. Her teeth were strong and white, rather large. He smelled the garlic she had had for lunch. She had a very nice chin. Beneath her jawbone on the left side there was an almost-round brown mole that he wanted to touch.
Everything he saw, he wanted to touch.
She didn’t blink. Their eyes were locke
d; there was no other place to look.
Then Santa Eulália had passed them. Josep stepped back. Without a word the girl slipped away from him and fled down the street.
He stood there, not knowing where to gaze, certain that everyone in the vicinity was staring at him accusingly for having pressed his hardened maleness against the purity of such a female. But when he raised his shamed eyes and glanced about, he saw that no one looked at him with any interest or appeared to have noticed anything, and he hurried away from there also.
For weeks after that he avoided the girl, unable to meet her eyes. He thought it was inevitable that she would never want to have anything to do with him. He sorely regretted that he had gone to the blacksmith shop on the Santa’s day, until one morning he and Teresa Gallego met at the well in the placa. While they were drawing water, they began to talk.
They looked directly at one another, and they spoke for a long time, quietly and seriously, as befit two people who had been brought together by Santa Eulália.
5
A Thing Between Brothers
Exactly a week after Josep’s return, his brother, Donat, came to the masia with his woman, Rosa Sert, his face a curious mixture of welcoming and foreboding. Donat had always been stocky, but now there were dewlaps under his jowls and already his belly was swollen like rising dough. Josep saw that soon Donat would be a really fat man.
His older brother, a fat semi-stranger who lived in the city.
They both exchanged kisses with him. Rosa was short and plump, a pleasant looking woman. She was watchful but smiled at him tentatively.
“Padre said you were gone for a soldier, probably in the Basque country,” Donat said. “Wasn’t that the purpose of that hunting group, to train you to be a soldier?”
