by Noah Gordon
Miquel Figueres came to one more meeting, but he confided to Josep with joy that he was going to live in Girona, to work on the chicken farm of an uncle who did not have sons. “A miracle. I prayed to Eulália and God damn it, she gave me a miracle, truly a miracle.”
Envious, most of the others also prayed to the saint—Josep did, long and hard!—but she turned a deaf ear, and after that, nobody quit. None of the others had anywhere else to go.
10
Strange Orders
All through that hot August of 1869 and into the month of September, the members of the hunting group sweated and toiled for the taciturn, watchful stranger. They watched him in return, careful not to stare. The sergeant’s mouth was a straight slash between thin lips. They quickly learned it was better for them when the corners of the mouth didn’t turn up. There was never humor in his rare, inscrutable smile, which appeared only when they performed in a way he considered truly contemptible, after which he worked them without mercy, running them so far, marching them so long, drilling them so hard, and making them review their errors so often, that the mistakes that had engendered the smile and disgust finally disappeared.
He was twice their age, yet he could outlast them when running, and he was able to march for hours without showing fatigue, though he had an injury. They had seen his leg when everyone took to the river after a long sweaty march. There was a bullet hole above his knee like a puckered belly button, which he must have received long ago, since it was fully healed. But on the outside of the thigh they saw the wound that made him limp, a long ugly scar that looked new enough to be still healing.
He sent them on missions, strange errands, sometimes alone, sometimes in groups—with terse instructions that were always bizarre.
“Find nine flat rocks the size of your fist. Five of the rocks must be gray and contain black mineral markings. Four must be perfectly white with no blemishes.”
“Find healthy trees and cut two dozen billets of live wood, seven of oak, six of olive wood, the rest of pine. Then peel them of bark. Each piece must be perfectly straight and twice as long as Jordi Arnau’s foot.”
One morning he sent Guillem Parera and Enric Vinyes to an olive grove in search of a key, which he said could be found at the foot of one of the trees. There were nine rows of olive trees, twelve trees to a row. They began at the first tree; on their hands and knees they made slow, painful circuits about the base of the trunk, widening the circle each time as they scrabbled with their fingers in the soil and detritus until they were certain the key hadn’t been hidden there.
Then they went on to the next tree.
More than five hours after they began, they were crawling around the second tree in the fifth row. Their filthy hands were scratched and sore, and two of Guillem’s fingers were bleeding. He told Josep later that nibbling at his mind was the disturbing thought that the sergeant might have buried the key a little deeper than their fingers were probing; perhaps it was under 15 or 20 centimeters of earth, beneath one of the trees they already had inspected.
But at the moment when that fear was strongest, Guillem heard Enric call out. Enric had overturned a small rock, and beneath it was a small brass key.
They wondered what lock the key had been fashioned to fit, but when they carried it back, they knew better than to ask Sergeant Peña. He accepted it and dropped it into his pocket.
“He’s a crazy son of a bitch,” Enric told Josep when the day’s training was done, but Guillem Parera shook his head.
“No, the things he has us do are difficult, but they’re not impossible or crazy. If you think about it, there’s a lesson attached to every assignment. The assignment about finding the special rocks and the assignment about the pieces of wood—Pay attention to the smallest details. The assignment about finding the key—Keep trying until you are successful.”
“I think he’s getting us accustomed to obey without thinking. To follow any command,” Josep said.
“No matter how peculiar the order?” Enric asked.
“Exactly,” Josep said.
Josep soon realized that he had neither talent nor aptitude for soldiering, and he felt certain that soon this would also become obvious to the driven, quiet man who was training them.
Sergeant Peña took them on forced marches in the dark of night and under the onslaught of the noonday sun. One morning he led them into the river, and they followed him in the water for mile after mile, stumbling over rocks, pulling the nonswimmers through pools. The youths had grown up along the river and knew it intimately for the few miles near the village, but he took them farther than they had ever been, finally taking them into a small cave. The grotto entrance was a bushy opening not easily seen, yet Peña led them to it without hesitation, and it struck Josep that the sergeant had been there before.
Wet and exhausted, they flopped down on the rock floor. “You must always be on the alert for places like this,” Peña told them. “Spain is a land of caves. There are many places to give you concealment when others are trying to find and kill you—a dark hole, a hollow tree, a stand of brush. You can even hide in a dip in the ground. You must learn to make yourself small behind a rock, to breathe without making sound.”
That afternoon he showed them how to crawl up to a sentry and take him from behind, how to pull his head back to extend his neck, and then how to cut his throat with a single slash.
He made them practice the technique, taking turns being the sentry and the stalker. They used short sticks instead of knives, the end always pointed away, so that what moved over the “victim’s” throat was the side of a fist. Still, when Josep had Xavier Miró’s head back and his neck exposed, for the briefest moment of weakness he could not bring himself even to simulate the throat-slitting.
To add to his nervousness, he saw that the cool, calculating eyes had caught the hesitation, and the mouth was smiling.
“Move your hand,” Peña said.
Humiliated, Josep drew his hand across Xavier’s throat.
The sergeant smiled. “What is hardest about killing is to think about it. But when it is necessary to kill— necessary to kill—then anyone can do it. Killing becomes very easy.
“Never fear, you will like war, Alvarez,” he said, again showing the bitter little smile, as if able to read Josep’s mind. “A young man with hot blood in his balls loves war, once he gets a little taste of it.”
Josep sensed that despite the words Sergeant Peña had recognized that his balls did not contain blood of the necessary heat and was watching him.
Later, as they sat in the woods, basted in their own sweat after the final run of the day, the man talked to them.
“There will be occasions during a war when the army advances beyond its department of supply. When that happens, soldiers must live off the land. They must either obtain food from the civilian population or starve…Can you understand that, Josep Alvarez?”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
“Within the next week, I want you to bring two chickens to our meeting, Alvarez.”
“Chickens…Sergeant?”
“Yes. Two chickens. Hens. Fat ones.”
“Senyor. Sergeant. I have no money to buy chickens.”
The man regarded him with lifted eyebrows. “Of course you do not. You will take them from a civilian, find them in the countryside as a soldier sometimes must do.”
The sergeant studied him. “Do you understand the order, Alvarez?”
“Yes, senyor,” he said miserably.
11
The Visitors
The next morning Marcel Alvarez and his sons began the harvesting of their vineyard, cutting the plump dark bunches of grapes and filling basket after basket, which they emptied into two good-sized tumbrels. Josep loved the musky, sweet scent and the heft of the juice-filled bunches in his hand. He threw himself into the work, but his exertions didn’t bring him peace of mind.
Jesús. From whom must I steal those chickens, those two fat hens?
It was
a terrible question. He could name offhand half a dozen villagers who raised chickens, but they did so because the eggs and meat were precious. They needed the birds to feed their families.
Mid-morning, he was diverted from his worrying when two neatly-dressed Frenchmen came to the vineyard. In courteous, strangely Frenchified Catalan, they introduced themselves as Andre Fontaine and Leon Mendes of Languedoc. Fontaine, tall and very slender, with a carefully tended goatee and a full head of hair like spun grey iron, was the wine buyer for a large vinegar-producing cooperative. His companion, Mendes, was shorter and portly, with a pink balding scalp, a round clean-shaven face, and serious brown eyes warmed by his smile. Since his accented Catalan was better than Fontaine’s, he did most of the talking for the pair.
He was a winemaker himself, he revealed. “My friend, Fontaine, is a bit short of good grapes this year,” Mendes said. “As you may have heard, we had two disastrous hailstorms in Southern France this spring. You did not have the same misfortune, I believe?”
“By the grace of heaven, no,” Marcel said.
“Most of the grapes in my own vineyard were undamaged, and the Mendes vineyard will make a vintage this year as usual. But some of the farmers in the vinegar cooperative have lost a lot of grapes, and Fontaine and I have come to Spain to buy young wine.”
Marcel and his sons continued to work while their visitors stood with them and talked companionably.
Fontaine took a small folding knife from his waistcoat pocket and cut a bunch from an Ull de Llebre vine, and then a Garnacha. He tasted several of the grapes from each bunch, munching judiciously. Then, his lips pursed, he glanced at Mendes and nodded.
Mendes had been watching Josep, noting the swift sure way that he filled his basket with fruit and emptied it, again and again. “Dieu, this boy works like a perpetual motion machine,” he called to Marcel Alvarez. “I would dearly love to have a few workers such as this one!”
Josep heard and drew a deep breath. When Miquel Figueres had been summoned to work on his uncle’s farm in Girona, he had told Josep gratefully that it was a miracle that allowed him to escape the unemployment in Santa Eulália. Could this plump little man in his brown French suit be a similar miracle, a source of a job for Josep?
One of the small wagons was bountifully filled, and Marcel looked to his sons. “Best bring this one to the press,” he called.
The visitors pitched in and helped the Alvarez men push the tumbrel filled with grapes to the small placa.
“The press is used by the community?” Mendes said.
“Yes, we share its use. My father and others built this beautiful large press more than fifty years ago,” Marcel said proudly. “His father had built a granite cistern for stomping the grapes. It exists still, behind our shed. I keep supplies in it now. You have your own press in Languedoc?”
“Actually, no. We tread our grapes. Treading produces a softer wine with maximum flavor, because the foot doesn’t break the pips and release bitterness. So long as we have feet we shall use them on our grapes, though it costs. It takes extra hired help and friends to tread the grapes from our eighteen hectares,” Mendes said.
“Easier and cheaper to do it this way. And one is not required to wash his feet,” Marcel said, and the visitors joined in his laughter.
Fontaine lifted one of the bunches. “They still have their stems, monsieur. Would you be willing to remove them if I should request it?” Fontaine asked.
“The stems do not hurt anything,” Marcel said slowly. “After all, senyor, you only want a wine that will become vinegar. Same as us.”
“We make a very special vinegar. Very expensive to buy, actually. To make such a special vinegar, one requires special grapes… If we were to buy from you, I would be prepared to pay for the extra effort of destemming.”
Marcel shrugged and then nodded.
When they reached the press with the tumbrel, the two Frenchmen stared as Josep and Donat began to shovel in bunches of grapes.
Fontaine cleared his throat. “It is not necessary to wash the press first?”
“Oh, it has been washed this morning, of course. Since then, it had received only grapes,” Marcel said.
“But there is something already in it!” Mendes cried.
It was true. A vomitous yellow sludge of broken fruit and stems still lay at the bottom of the press tub.
“Ah, my neighbor, Pau Fortuny, has been here before me and has left me a small gift of white grapes…It is no problem, it all makes juice,” Marcel said.
Fontaine saw that Donat Alvarez had found half a basket of white grapes left behind by the sloppy Pau Fortuny and had added these grapes to the press as well.
He glanced at Mendes. The smaller man understood his look at once and shook his head regretfully.
“Well, my friend, we wish you good fortune,” Mendes said, and Josep saw that the Frenchmen were preparing to leave.
“Senyor,” he blurted.
Mendes turned and looked at him.
“I would like to work for you, senyor, and help you make wine at your vineyard in…in…”
“My vineyard is in the country, near the village of Roquebrun, in Languedoc. But…work for me? Ah, but I am sorry. I fear that would be quite impossible.”
“But, senyor, you said…I heard you say…that you wished you had someone like me to work with your grapes.”
“Well, young man…But that was only a manner of speaking. A way to offer a compliment.”
The Frenchman’s eyes were on Josep’s face, and what he saw there visibly embarrassed him and made him regretful. “You are an excellent worker, young man. But I already have a crew in Languedoc, deserving local people from Roquebrun who have worked for me a long time and are trained in my requirements. You understand?”
“Yes, senyor. Of course. Local people,” Josep said.
He was aware of his father and Donat gazing at him, and he turned to the tumbrel and resumed shoveling grapes into the press.
12
Foraging
During the remainder of the harvest Josep returned to hard, practical thought, uncontaminated by childish hope or dreams of miracles.
Where was he to get two hens?
He told himself that if he must steal, it should be from a wealthy man whose family wouldn’t suffer because of the crime, and he knew of only one rich man who raised chickens.
The alcalde. “Angel Casals,” he said aloud.
His brother looked up.
“What about him?” Donat said.
“Oh…He…rode past on their mule, inspecting the village,” Josep said.
Donat went back to cutting bunches of grapes. “Why do I care?” he said.
It would be dangerous. Angel Casals had a rifle of which he was proud, a long weapon with a mahogany stock that he kept oiled and polished like a gem. While Josep was still a small boy, the alcalde had used the rifle to kill a fox that had been trying to get at his chickens. The children of the village had stroked the corpse; Josep remembered clearly the beauty of the animal, the perfect softness of the lustrous red-brown coat and the silky white fur of the stomach, the yellow eyes fixed in death.
He was certain Angel would fire at a thief just as readily as he had fired at the fox.
The chicken theft would have to occur in the middle of the night, when everyone else in the village was deep in the sleep of honest working people. Josep thought he would be all right after he had gained concealment in the chicken house. The birds would be accustomed to the alcalde’s sons coming into the henhouse to collect eggs; if he moved slowly and quietly, the chickens shouldn’t make much of a fuss.
It was the time just before entering the henhouse that was the heaviest problem. Angel had a large, black mastiff, vicious and a barker. The safest way to deal with the dog would be to kill him, but Josep knew he could not kill a dog any more than he could slit a man’s throat.
And the dog scared him.
For several days he ate only part of his chorizo when he
had his dinner, gathering a modest collection of meat in one of his pockets, but he quickly realized it would not be enough. After the finish of the harvest, when he and Donat had taken the barrel containing the juice from the last batch of grapes and added it to one of the age-blackened fermenting vats in his father’s shed, Josep walked to the grocery and asked Nivaldo if perhaps he had some salchicha so spoiled he would not be able to sell it.
“What do you want with rotten sausage?” Nivaldo said grumpily, and Josep told him it was needed for an exercise in woodcraft dreamed up by the sergeant, which required the baiting of animal traps. The old man took Josep to the storeroom where he kept a variety of salchichas, a whole row of large sausages hung on strings from a beam to cure, some of them whole, some already cut and partially sold off—morcilla made with onion and paprika, lomo with and without red pepper, salchichon, sobresada. Josep pointed to a piece of lomo that looked decidedly green on the cut end, but Nivaldo shook his head. “Are you serious? That is excellent slow-cured pork. Cut off the end and the rest will be beautiful. No, this stuff is all too good to throw away. But you wait here,” he said, and threaded his way between a mountain of beans in sacks and a box of wrinkled potatoes. Josep heard him grunting behind the bean mountain as he moved bags and boxes, and eventually he returned holding a long piece of…something, mostly covered in a white growth.
“Uh, will…the animals…you know, want it?”
Nivaldo closed his eyes. “Will they want it? Blood sausage made with rice? This is too good for them, morcilla that has been forgotten and aged too long. It’s just what you’re looking for, Tigre.”
When Josep was a boy, a cur bit him, a skinny yellow mutt owned by the Figueres family. Whenever he passed their vineyard, the dog leaped out at him, barking madly. Terrified, he tried to intimidate the animal by shouting at it and staring with false menace into the dark little eyes that seemed to him the incarnation of evil, but that only made the dog wilder. As it came at him one day, snarling, he kicked out in his fright and sharp teeth closed on his ankle, drawing blood when he yanked his leg away. For two years, until the dog died, Josep avoided going near the Figueres vineyard.
