by Noah Gordon
“My…brother.”
His co-worker smiled at Josep and took his hand. Then the man touched his own face and turned away. It was a workers’ signal, Josep would learn, indicating that a boss was watching. He could see the overseer—seated behind a table on a small raised platform in the center of the room—looking sharply at them. Next to the overseer a large sign proclaimed
WORK IN SILENCE!
SPEAKING DOES NOT ALLOW YOU TO DO PERFECT WORK!
Donat quickly led him from the room. They followed the path of the wool through the many processes that led to the spinning of the yarn and thread and the weaving and dyeing of the cloth. Josep was dizzied by the noise and the combined stinks of raw wool, machine oil, coal lamps, and the sweat of a thousand active workers. By the time Donat proudly instructed him to stroke the finished rolls of richly colored fabric, Josep was trembling, and eager to do or say anything that would allow him to get away from the ceaseless, conglomerate screaming of the machines.
He helped Donat dispose of the rotting bale of wool in a dump behind the factory. The sound of the machines followed, but he was grateful to be away from them.
“Can I have a bag of this stuff? I believe I can use it.”
Donat laughed. “Why not? This stinking mess is no good to us. You can have as much as you can bear away.” He filled a cloth sack with the wool and smiled indulgently when his strange brother carried it as they walked from the dump.
Donat and Rosa lived in the mill village, in a tiny “cheap house,” so called because workers rented them from the company inexpensively. His was one in many rows of identical houses. Each house had two miniscule rooms—a bedroom and a combination kitchen and sitting room—and shared an outhouse with a neighbor. Rosa greeted Josep warmly and at once produced the two copies of the sales agreement. “My cousin Carles the lawyer approves the changes,” she said, and watched narrowly as her husband signed both papers. When Josep accepted one of the papers and handed Rosa the notes that were his first payment for the land, she and Donat beamed.
“We will celebrate,” Donat declared, and hurried away to buy the ingredients of a feast. While he was gone, Rosa left Josep alone in the house but returned very quickly, accompanied by a buxom young woman: “My friend Ana Zulema, from Andalucia.” Both women had clearly prepared for the occasion and wore almost identical dark skirts and starched white blouses.
Donat returned very quickly with food and drink. “I went to the company store. We also have a company church and a company priest. And a company school for small children. You see, all that we need is right here. We never have to leave.” He laid out spiced meat, salads, bacallá, breads, olives; Josep saw that he must have spent most of the first payment on food. “I bought brandy, and vinegar made by the people that used to buy from Padre. Maybe this very bottle of vinegar was made from Padre’s grapes!”
Donat drank deeply of the brandy. Even when he was at home, he couldn’t seem to stop talking about his work. “It’s a new world here. The workers in this mill, they are from all over Spain. Many came from the south, because there are no jobs there. Others had their old lives torn up in the war craziness—houses ruined by the Carlists, crops burned in the fields, food stolen by soldiers, children starving.
“There is a new start here, such a fine future for them and for me, with the machines! Are not the machines wonderful?”
“They are,” Josep said, but hesitantly, because the machines intimidated him.
“I shall be an apprentice only until I’ve been with the mill for two years, and then I’ll be a weaver.” Life wasn’t easy for mill workers, Donat admitted. “The rules are hard. One has to be discreet about spending time in the outhouse when that is necessary. There is no meal break, so I bring a piece of cheese or a little meat in my pocket and eat it while working.” The mill ran twenty-four hours a day, two long shifts, he said. “It stops only on Sundays, when the machinery is oiled and repaired. That’s the work I wish to do, some day.”
When the four of them finished the bottle of brandy, Donat yawned, took his wife’s hand, and announced it was time for bed.
Josep had been drinking brandy too, and his head swam. He found himself lying next to Ana on the pallet Donat had unfurled for him on the floor. Beyond the thin wooden door Donat and Rosa were making love noisily. Ana giggled and moved closer. She had strongly perfumed face powder. When they kissed, she moved her leg over his body.
It was several months since Josep had been with Margit in Languedoc, and his body felt weak with the strength of his need for release. Ana tried to pull him to her; but he was having a nightmare vision of this stranger, pregnant; a hasty marriage in the company church, a job for him as a company peon in that roaring, clacking hell.
“Josep?” she said eventually, but he forced himself to pretend he was asleep, and soon she got up and went out of the house.
He lay awake all the night, wanting her back, sullen and ashamed that he had let her go. He listened to the fury of the machines, burdened with worry over the debt he had incurred to his brother and sister-in-law. Before dawn he left the pallet, took the sack of wool from where it had been left outside the door, and began to walk toward home.
It was late afternoon before he reached Santa Eulália. He had had five separate rides, walking in between each one. He was tired, but he went at once to the row in the vineyard where he had worked on impacted earth the day before. He spread generous handfuls of the wool in wide circles around each of the Ull de Llebre vines and then dug the material into the thin soil. He felt that the wool, already rotting, might feed some elements that could help the vines. At any rate, the springy wool loosened the soil and would make it possible for water and air to find their way to the roots. He worked until the sack was empty and was sorry he hadn’t carried more of the wool home. Perhaps, he thought, he might convince Donat to bring him another bag.
As dusk fell, he went into the old stone house that suddenly seemed solid and dependable and got chorizo and a hunk of bread and a wine skin. He climbed halfway up the ridge and sat on a rock and ate his evening meal and sprayed the sour wine into his mouth. The evening felt crisp and clean, and in a few weeks the air would be perfumed with the smell of green, growing things.
When he had been a small boy, Nivaldo had told him that deep in the ground beneath his father’s land there lived a village of little furry creatures, neither man nor animal—the Small Ones. It was the occupation of these creatures to bring moisture and sustenance to the hungry and thirsty roots of his father’s vines, Nivaldo had told him, and their destiny was to produce grapes from the vines regularly, year after year. Often as Josep went to sleep at night, fearful but fascinated, he had pictured them—little, burrowing figures like young children with fur and sharp-nailed hands they used to dig, communicating with squeaks and grunts, laboring, laboring within the dark earth.
Now he spilled a little wine into the ground, a sacrifice to the Small Ones, and as he watched, an owl moved past in the sky. For a fleeting moment it was silhouetted against the full moon, the feathers at the tips of its wings like spread fingers. Then it was gone. Everything was so quiet that he could hear the silence, and at that moment, with tremendous relief, he knew he had made a wonderful bargain with Donat and Rosa.
7
Neighbors
He was walking slowly along his rows, enjoying the sight of the pale bumps and eager tendrils on the awakening vines and looking for snails or any sign of blight that would call for treatment with sulfer.
He heard Maria del Mar Orriels from her own vineyard.
“Francesc. Francesc, where are you?”
At first she called out every couple of minutes, but soon she was shouting more frequently from the road, annoyance in her voice: “FRA-A-AN-CE-E-ESC!”
Josep saw the little boy peering at him from the end of the row of vines, like an imagined garden imp.
The child hadn’t come from the direction of the road. Josep knew he must have walked from the back of h
is mother’s land, through the Torras holding, and then onto Josep’s vineyard. There were no fences. Little more than the width of one person separated a grower’s plantings from his neighbors; they all knew very well the boundaries of their properties.
“Hello there,” Josep said, but the boy didn’t answer.
“I’m walking my rows. Learning to know my vines again. Taking care of business, you see?”
The child’s large eyes never left Josep’s face. He was dressed in a threadbare but carefully mended shirt and trousers, undoubtedly sewn by his mother out of the best parts of overused adult garments. One of the knees of his trousers was earth-stained, and there was a small tear over the other knee.
“Frannn-ce-e-sc! Fra-a-nn-ce-e-scc!”
“He’s here. He’s up here with me,” Josep shouted. He reached down and took the small hand. “We’d best bring you to your mama.”
Francesc seemed no different from any other country child, but once they started to walk his pronounced limp was painful for Josep to experience. His right leg was shorter than the other. With every step of the shorter leg, his head was deeply drawn to the right, then it was pulled erect again with the next step of his left leg.
They met his mother halfway to the road. He had never known her well, but he saw she was discernibly different from the girl he remembered. Older, harder, with a guarded wariness in the eyes, as though she expected bad news or nastiness at any moment. She had good posture. Her body seemed ripe and large, her long legs hidden in a soiled black skirt, muddy at her knees; some recent strenuous effort had crazed her hair and left her flushed and sweaty. When she knelt by the child he saw a dark wet circle on the back of her work shirt, between her shoulder blades.
She took Fransesc’s hand. “I told you to stay on our land while I worked. Why did you not do that?” she asked her son severely.
The little boy smiled.
“Hello, Maria del Mar.”
“Hello, Josep.”
He was afraid she would ask him about Jordi. Jordi was dead; the last time Josep had seen him, Jordi’s throat had just been cut. But when Del Mar looked at him, her eyes were unquestioning and impersonal.
“I’m sorry if he bothered you,” she said.
“No, he’s a fine boy. He’s welcome anytime…I’ll be working my father’s land now,” he said, aware that by now everyone in the village must know that he had become the owner.
“I wish you good fortune,” she said quietly.
“Thank you.”
She addressed her son again. “Well, you know better than this, Francesc. You must stay nearby when I’m working.” She nodded to Josep, took Francesc by the hand, and led him off. Josep noted that despite her impatience she did not walk fast, allowing for the boy’s hindrance, and he found himself moved as he watched them walk away.
He sat with Nivaldo that afternoon, drinking coffee and brooding. “Our women didn’t wait very long for us, did they?”
“Why would you expect that they would?” Nivaldo said reasonably. “You left without telling them you weren’t coming back. You never sent word to anyone after that, even just to say you were alive. Everyone in the village came to believe you were gone for good.”
Josep knew the old man was right. “I don’t believe any of us could have sent word. I couldn’t. There were…reasons.”
Nivaldo waited a moment in case more information was forthcoming. When it wasn’t, he nodded.
If anyone should understand, it was Nivaldo; there were things in Nivaldo’s own life that the old Cuban couldn’t talk about.
“Well, what’s done is done,” Nivaldo said. “There’s a limit to how long a man and woman can stay apart and still be a couple.”
Josep didn’t want to talk about Teresa, but he couldn’t help a bitter observation. “Maria del Mar certainly lost little time in marrying.”
“God, Josep! She had to figure out some way to survive. Her father was long gone and her mother was sick with the consumption. They barely earned their food, as I’m sure you remember.”
Josep did.
“Her mother died soon after you left. She had nothing but that healthy body and a little kid. Lots of women would have gone to some city and started selling it out of a park. She chose to accept when Ferran Valls offered to marry her. And she’s got big balls, that girl, she labors like a horse. Since Ferran died she grows those grapes all by herself. She’s a better worker than most men, but she’s had it hard. Lots of folks think it’s fine for a woman to be a worker in the fields, but they see a female who’s her own boss, trying to run her own business—they can’t stand that, the jealous shits call her a greedy bitch.
“Clemente Ramirez, who buys for the vinegar company, he pays her less than he pays for wine made by a man. I’ve tried talking to him, but he just laughs. She can’t just switch and sell her grapes elsewhere. Even if she could connect to another company, she knows they would cheat her in the same way. A woman without a husband is at their mercy. She’s got to take whatever they give her, so she can feed the boy.”
Josep was thoughtful. “I’m surprised she hasn’t married again.”
Nivaldo shook his head. “I don’t think she wants anything from any man, if you catch my meaning. Ferran was already old when they married. I’m sure he mostly wanted a strong worker, free labor. After he died she took up with Tonio Casals and he lived in her house most of last year. He kept on working for his father and never did anything in her vineyard. Tonio’s the kind who does mean things to his mules and his women. She must have soon seen that he’d be a terrible example for the little boy, and finally she got rid of him.
“So think about it. First, Jordi got her pregnant and left her. Then Ferran took her in only because she can work and work. And then Tonio Casals…Almost for certain he mistreated her. With that kind of a past, I imagine she considers it a blessing to be without a man, don’t you?”
Josep did.
The way it sometimes does, summer drove spring away with a burst of very hot weather. The high heat continued for five weeks, forcing bud break and then searing the blossoms, foreshadowing another season of drought and a light harvest. Josep roamed the vineyard, watching the plants closely. He knew that in their constant search for moisture the old vines had sunk meandering roots. The deep roots helped them survive, but after a time some of the vines began to develop flaccid shoot tips and yellowed basal leaves, signs of intense stress.
Then he awoke one morning to thunder and a world awash. The rain slashed without pause for three days, followed by a return of heavy warmth. The tough grapevines survived, the heat and the rain combining to produce fresh buds and then a profusion of new flowering that would become a heavy crop of extra large fruit. Josep knew that if the weather was the same in Languedoc, Leon Mendes was full of gloom, for the large, vigorously growing grapes would be inferior in flavor and character, poor stuff from which to fashion wines. But what was bad news in Languedoc was good news in Santa Eulália, where increased bulk and weight of the grapes meant more wine to sell to the vinegar and brandy companies. Josep knew that the weather had made it possible for him to realize income from his first season as proprietor of the vineyard, and he was grateful. Still, he was intrigued to note that in the row of old Ull de Llebre plants where he had dug in raw wool to aerate the hard soil, the vines were full and dense and laden with clusters. He couldn’t resist treating the fruit of just that one row of vines as he knew Mendes would have done, thinning it and taking some of the leaves, so the essence of each plant would be concentrated in the grapes that were left.
The lush weather and the moisture had caused the weeds to flourish as well, and soon the spaces between the rows were overgrown again. Cultivating the vineyard by hand would be an unending task. The horse show in Castelldefels had come and gone, and Josep had resisted the urge to buy a mule. Slowly but surely, his little hoard of money was depleting, and he was aware that he must conserve his funds.
But Maria del Mar Orriels had a mule. He
forced himself to go to her vineyard and approach her.
“Good morning, Marimar.”
“Good morning.”
“The weeds are fierce, no?”
She stared at him.
“If you let me use your mule to pull my plow, I’ll turn your weeds under as well as my own.”
She thought for a moment and then agreed.
“Good,” Josep said. She watched while he went and fetched the animal. He started to lead the mule away, but she held up her hand.
“Do mine first,” she said thinly.
8
A Social Organization
There was a time when he and Teresa Gallego had been inseparable, when everything had been clear to them, the world and the future plain to contemplate, like the routes on a simple map. Marcel Alvarez had seemed strong as stone; Josep had thought Padre would live a long time. He knew vaguely that when Padre finally did die, Donat would take over the vineyard, and he was dimly aware that then he would have to find a way to earn his own living. He and Teresa would find some way to marry, have children, do hard labor to earn their bread, and then die as everyone must, Jesús protect us! There was nothing complicated about it. They understood very well what was possible in life, and what was needed.
