by Noah Gordon
“I am as good a grower as any man!” she said bitterly.
“Better than most. Anyone with eyes can see how hard you work, how well you do.”
“All right,” she said finally, and turned away.
He felt curiously relieved as she resumed working, but a simple word of gratitude would not have been misplaced, he thought sourly, and went back to work himself.
Rain fell for a few hours two mornings later when they began to harvest Josep’s crop, but it was gentle moisture that beaded the grapes and made them more beautiful. The three neighbors cooperated smoothly, by now familiar with each other’s individual work rhythms. Though accustomed to working alone, Josep almost regretted it when all his bunches had been squeezed by the big press and the juice was safely within the old fermenting vats in the shed behind his casa. He thanked his neighbors and told himself that he and the Small Ones had made a very good beginning.
When Ramirez and his two helpers showed up with their big wagon filled with barrels, the wine buyer was clumsy with words of sympathy and effusive with congratulations to the new owner of the vineyard.
Josep thanked him. “Actually, I’ve taken over the Vall vineyard as well.”
Clemente cocked his head and stared, his lips pursed. “Ah…You and she…?”
“No, I’ve bought the vineyard.”
So…where shall she go?”
“She’ll go no where. She’ll continue to grow grapes here.”
“Ahhh. So she will work for you?”
“That’s it.”
Clemente looked sideways at Josep and smiled. He opened his mouth to say more, but he caught something in Josep’s face.
“Well,” he said, “I’ll empty these vats first. They’ll take several trips, and then we’ll get to the Valls vineyard. Best to start pumping wine, eh?”
At midday, he and his men were seated in the shade of his wagon, chewing bread, when Josep passed nearby. “Did you know you have a rotted place in one of your vats?” he called cheerfully.
“No,” Josep said.
Clemente showed him, several slats in the aged oaken vat. The rot had been easy to overlook, since the wood was mostly blackened with age.
“Might get away without leakage for another season or two.”
“I hope so,” Josep said bleakly.
Maria del Mar was busy with her vines when they arrived at Vall’s. She nodded at them and continued to work.
When Ramirez had taken the last of the wine from her vats, he directed his horses to the side of the road, and he and Josep leaned against the wagon and settled up, Josep doing the mathematics several times before accepting the bundle of bank notes.
Several hours later, when he returned to the Vall winery, Maria del Mar was still on her knees midway down a row of vines.
Josep was careful about separating her share of the money correctly. She did not watch and accepted the bills in a silence that he took as further proof of her anger and coldness, so he muttered a goodbye and went away.
The next morning, when he left the casa to begin his day’s work, he almost stumbled over something that had been left in front of his door. It was a large, flat dish filled with potato tortilla still warm from the fire, so freshly made he could smell the onions and the eggs. A piece of paper, weighted down by a small stone, rested on the clean cloth in which the tortilla was wrapped.
One side of the paper was an old receipt which showed that for 92 centimos her late husband had purchased a narrow-bladed rake from a farm store in Vilafranca.
In the center of the reverse side there were three words done in the cramped, lopsided hand of a woman who rarely needed to write.
WE THANK YOU
27
Winter
One January morning he was carrying buckets, three in each hand, to be scrubbed in the river, when he saw Francesc sitting in the sun at the front of his mother’s property.
The little boy’s face brightened. “Hola, Josep!”
“Hola, Francesc. How are you this morning?
“I am fine, Josep. I am waiting for the olives to ripen so I may climb my trees again.”
“I see,” Josep said gravely. Growers of early-bearing varieties had been picking olives since November or December, but these were late bearers. The large trees bore heavily only every six or seven years, and this year there was a meager crop of olives colored light green to mature purple-black, olives for eating and not for oil. Maria del Mar had stretched cloths beneath each tree to catch the olives that ripened and fell away, and she would use a stick to beat down those that remained on the tree. It was an efficient way of harvesting them when they were ready to be cured in salt or brine, but it struck Josep that the ripening process must be gallingly slow to a little boy aching to climb again.
“May I sit with you for a while?” he said on sudden impulse, and when Francesc nodded, he set down his buckets and sank to the ground.
“I need these trees. I must practice climbing, for I hope some day to be the anxaneta of the Castellers,” Francesc said seriously.
“The pinnacle,” Josep said, wondering whether such an ambition was realistic, given the boy’s misshapen hip. “I hope you get your wish.” He cast a look for Maria del Mar, who was nowhere in sight. “And what does your mother think of your idea?”
“She says all things are possible, if I practice very hard. And meantime, my job is to watch the olives.”
“These trees are slow to drop them, eh?”
“Yes. But they are good trees to climb.”
It was true. The trees were very old and oversized, with thick trunks and contorted limbs. “These are very special trees. Some people think olive trees this old were planted by the Romans.”
“Romans?”
“Romans were people who came to Spain a long time ago. They were fighters, but they also planted olives and grapes and built roads and bridges.”
“Long time ago?”
“Very long ago, almost back when Jesús was alive.”
“Jesús Crist?”
“Yes.”
“My mother told me of him.”
“Did she?”
“Josep, was Jesús a padre?”
He smiled and opened his mouth to say no, but when he looked down at on the small face he was baffled by the extent of his own ignorance. ‘I don’t know,” Josep said, and reached out wonderingly and touched the boy’s face. He was a skinny little boy but there was baby fat at that place, just above the jawbone.
“Would you like to come to the river with me? Why don’t you ask your mother if you may go to the river to help me wash out my pails,” he suggested, and smiled to see the how fast the hobbling boy could run.
In a very short time Francesc was back. “She says no, no, no,” he said soberly. “She says I must watch the olives. That is my work.”
Josep smiled at him. “It’s good to have work, Francesc,” he said, and he collected his buckets and went off to the river to clean them.
One morning he met Jaumet Ferrer returning from a hunt, carrying two plump partridges he had just killed, and they paused to talk. Jaumet was just the same as Josep remembered, a good-natured, slow-minded boy who had become a good-natured, slow-minded man.
Jaumet asked him no questions. He gave no sign he was aware that Josep had been away from the village for an extended time. They chatted about the partridges, which were destined for the Sunday table of Senyora Figueres, and about the weather, and Jaumet smiled and went on his way.
Both Jaumet and the overweight Pere Mas had been interested in the hunting group but had been unfit to undergo the training.
How fortunate they had been!
That evening Josep brought to the grocery a pitcher of the new wine he had retained for his own use when Clemente Ramirez had emptied his vats. While Nivaldo cooked eggs with peppers and onions, they sipped the wine without joy, for it had been insipid stuff to begin with and heat already had turned it sour.
“Ech,” Josep said.
/> Nivaldo nodded judiciously. “Well, not wonderful wine, but…a cash crop. You have money to pay your brother and Rosa, money to allow you to work on next year’s vintage, money to buy food. Speaking of which, I must tell you, Tigre, you eat like a stupid animal. The only time you have a decent meal is when you come to me. Otherwise, you keep yourself alive with chorizo and old bread and a bite of cheese. You are my best customer for chorizo.”
Josep thought of the potato tortilla, which had given him two good meals. “I’m a working man with no woman in the house. I have no time to waste on complicated meals.”
Nivaldo snorted. “You should find yourself a wife. But I’m a man who lives without a woman, yet I cook. A man doesn’t require a woman to make a decent meal. A sensible man catches a fish, shoots a bird, learns to cook for himself.”
“What has happened to Pere Mas? I don’t see him in the village,” Josep said, to change the subject.
“No,” Nivaldo said. “Pere has found work in a mill that produces cloth, like Donat. In Sabadell.”
“Oh.” Josep found he was almost as lonely in Santa Eulália as he had been in the Languedoc. The first sons of the village were busily entrenched in their lives. Of his own generation of younger sons, his closest friends were gone.
“I never see a man come to Maria del Mar’s house.”
“I don’t think there has been anyone since Tonio. Who knows? Perhaps she is hoping Jordi Arnau may come back to her.”
“…Jordi Arnau is dead,” Josep said.
“You’re certain?”
“I’m certain, though I didn’t tell her that. I couldn’t go into it.”
Nivaldo nodded, not judging him. “Still, she is aware that some people come back,” he said thoughtfully. “You came back, didn’t you?” he said, and took another sip of the sour wine.
28
Cooking
Josep’s first winter as a landowner began with dull weather, and the glow of satisfaction at getting in his own crop dwindled and disappeared. The vines had lost most of their handsome leaves and become dry, brittle skeletons, and it was time to begin the serious pruning. He walked the vineyard and looked at it critically. He saw that already he had made mistakes, and he concentrated on learning from them.
For example, the vines he had so smugly planted on the bare section of steep hillside, thinking he was more imaginative and more clever than his father and his forebears, had dried up and died in the burning summer’s heat, because—as Padre must surely have understood!—at that spot the insubstantial layer of topsoil sat on impenetrable rock. To survive there, the vines needed to be irrigated, and both the river and the well in the village were too far away to make that practical.
Josep wondered what else his father had known about the land that he had failed to absorb while coming of age.
He had no inclination to become a hunter himself, but the next time he met up with Jaume he recalled Nivaldo’s lecture about his need to eat better.
“Can you get me a rabbit?” he asked, and Jaume smiled his slow smile and nodded. He came to the casa the next afternoon with a young rabbit he had shot in the neck, and he seemed pleased by the coins Josep gave to him in return. He showed Josep how to skin and dress the animal.
“How do you like to cook them?” Josep asked.
“I fry them in lard,” Jaume said, and departed with a bonus, the head and the pelt. But Josep remembered how his father had dealt with rabbit. He went to the grocery and gathered garlic, a carrot, an onion, and a long, red picant pepper. Nivaldo raised his eyebrows as Josep paid him.
“Doing some cooking, are we?”
Back home, he drenched a cloth in his sour wine and scrubbed the little carcass inside and out, then quartered it. He placed the pieces into a pot with wine and olive oil, added half a dozen crushed garlic cloves, and cut the vegetables into the pot before setting it above a small fire to simmer.
When he ate two of the pieces hours later, the meat was so tender and good he felt sanctified. He sopped up the spicy gravy, allowing it to soften chunks of stale bread until they became semi-liquid and luscious, so that he almost sucked them down.
When he was finished eating, he carried the pot to the grocery, where Nivaldo was chopping up a cabbage for the stew.
“Something for you to taste,” he said.
While Nivaldo ate, Josep read El Cascabel.
Despite himself, the events that had enmeshed him had resulted in making him more interested in politics and the monarchy. He always read the newspaper carefully, but he almost never found the kind of information he was looking for. Soon after he had returned to the village, El Cascabel had published a story about General Prim on the fourth anniversary of his assassination. The article had revealed that following the murder several people had been taken into custody, but after questioning them, the police had let them go.
Nivaldo chewed and swallowed busily. “I haven’t read the paper yet. Is there anything of interest?”
“There is still bitter fighting. We may be thankful it has not come nearer to us. In Navarre, the Carlists attacked a force and seized arms and artillery pieces and took three hundred prisoners. Déu!” He rattled the newspaper. “They nearly captured our new king.”
Nivaldo looked over at Josep. “So? What was King Alfonso doing with the troops?”
“It says that he attended Sandhurst, the British military college, and he will take an active part in quelling the civil war.”
“Oh? That is interesting,” Nivaldo agreed. He ate the last bit of meat, and to Josep’s satisfaction he began to suck the bones.
Francesc was left to amuse himself alone much of the time while Maria del Mar labored nearby, and frequently he appeared at the Alvarez vineyard to follow after Josep like a shadow. At first they rarely had conversations; when they did, it was always about simple things, the shape of a cloud, the color of a flower, or why weeds were not allowed to prosper and grow. Most often Josep worked in silence, and the little boy watched raptly, though he had seen his mother doing similar tasks again and again in her own vineyard.
When it was clear that Josep was reaching the end of a task, the boy always spoke the same words.
“What do we do now, Josep?”
“Now, we hoe some weeds,” Josep would say.
Or, “We oil the tools.”
Or “We dig up this rock.”
Whatever his reply, the child would nod as though giving his permission, and they would move to the next chore.
Josep suspected that as well as the need for company, Francesc was drawn to the sound of a man’s voice, and at times he spoke comfortably and softly about things the boy was too young to absorb, the way a person may sometimes talk to himself while working.
One morning he explained why he was transplanting wild rosebushes in front of and behind each row of grapevines. “It’s something I saw in France. The flowers are beautiful but they also do a job, they give warning. The roses aren’t as strong as the vines, so if something goes wrong—if a problem develops with the soil, for example—then the roses will show signs of the trouble first, and I can think about how to fix it before it hurts the vines,” he said. The boy soberly watched until the transplanting was finished.
“What do we do now, Josep?” he asked.
Maria del Mar grew accustomed to the fact that when she did not see her son at home, he most likely could be found at the Alvarez vineyard. “You must send him home when he becomes a bother,” she told Josep, but he meant it when he replied that he enjoyed Francesc’s company. He sensed that Maria del Mar harbored a resentment toward him. He didn’t understand the reason, but he knew the distrust made her hesitate to accept any favors from him. He had settled into an identity as her neighbor, a relationship which each of them seemed to accept.
Nivaldo was right, he told himself. He needed a wife. There were widows and unmarried females in the village. He should begin to pay attention until he found a woman who would share the work of the vineyard, keep the house,
cook him real meals. Give him children, share his bed…
Ah, share his bed!
Lonesome and wanting, he walked into the country one day, to the lopsided house of Nuria, but the house was deserted, the door left open to the wind and any animal or bird. A man spreading fertilizer in a nearby field told him that Nuria had died two years before.
“And the daughter, Renata?”
“Set free by the mother’s death. Gone away.” He shrugged.
The man said he raised beans in the field. “The soil is thin, but I have plenty of goat-shit from the Llobets. You know their farm?”
“No,” Josep said, suddenly interested.
“Llobet goat farm. Very old farm.” He smiled. “Very big, many goats, they are drowning in goat shit, old goat shit, new goat shit, piled in their fields. No place to store it any more. They know that in the future they will have a lot more goat shit. A lot. They kiss your hands when you take away a load.”
“Where is the farm?”
“An easy walk south, over the hill.”
Josep thanked the bean grower, whose information, he knew, was a stroke of fortune, better for him than if he had found Nuria and Renata still living in the house.
29
Hinny
On the rare occasions when Padre had found a source of fertilizer, he had borrowed a horse and wagon to carry it home, but Josep didn’t have the kind of relationship with his father’s friends that allowed for such presumption. He knew he couldn’t go on using Maria del Mar’s mule indefinitely, and his first successful harvest had given him the cautious courage to spend some money, so one morning he made his way to Sitges and sought out the cooperage of Emilio Rivera. The barrel factory was a long low building with peeled logs stacked in the yard. Near the stacks he found the red-faced barrel-maker, Rivera, and an elderly worker with whom he was quartering logs, using steel wedges and heavy mauls. Rivera didn’t remember Josep until he was reminded of the morning when he had been kind enough to give a stranger a ride to Barcelona.
