by Noah Gordon
“Ahh, my God…” The words sounded so wounded.
Josep knew the hoarse voice.
“Quim?”
The man continued to sob. Josep could smell the brandy, and he knelt to him.
“Come, Quim. Come on, old friend, let me take you to the house.” Josep raised Quim with difficulty. Half dragging and half supporting, he moved toward his neighbor’s casa, Quim’s legs loose and unhelpful. Inside the house, Josep fumbled in the dark until he got the oil lamp lit, but he made no attempt to get Quim upstairs. Instead he went by himself to the fetid upper room and came down with the sleeping pallet, which he spread on the kitchen floor.
Quim had stopped weeping. He sat with his back to the wall and watched dully as Josep assembled and lighted a small fire and set the pan of cold coffee, perhaps days old, on the grate. There was a chunk of hard bread in the breadbox. Quim took the bread when Josep handed it to him and held it in his hand, but he didn’t eat it. When the coffee was hot, Josep poured some into a cup and blew on it until it was drinkable, then he held it to the other man’s mouth.
Quim took a sip and groaned.
Josep knew the coffee must be terrible but didn’t remove the cup. “Just another swallow,” he said, “with a bite of the bread.”
But Quim was weeping again, silently this time, his face turned away.
In a few moments he sighed and scrubbed at his eyes with the fist still holding the bread. “It was goddamned Angel Casals.”
Josep was confused. “What was?”
“Angel Casals, that piece of filth. It was Angel got Padre Felipe transferred.”
“No! Angel?”
“Yes, yes, the alcalde, the ignorant, dirty old bastard couldn’t stand to look at us. We knew.”
“You can’t be certain,” Josep said.
“I’m certain! The alcalde wanted us out of his village. He knows someone who knows somebody else who is high up in the church, in Barcelona. That’s all it took. I’ve been told.”
“I’m sorry, Quim.” But Josep was unable to offer healing or even comfort. “You must try to pull yourself together. I’ll drop by tomorrow and knock on your door. Will you be all right if I leave you alone?”
Quim didn’t answer. Then he looked at Josep and nodded.
Josep turned to leave. Stopped by a vision of Quim knocking over the light and spilling flaming oil, he picked up the lamp. In the entry he extinguished it and set it safely out of the way. “Goodnight then, Quim,” he said, and after a moment he closed the door on the silent darkness.
In the morning he went early to the grocery and bought bread and cheese and olives and left the food and a jar of fresh water on Quim’s doorstep. On his way home he passed the place where he had found his sodden abutter spilling his grief among the vines. Nearby, Josep discovered the broken pieces of an empty brandy bottle that had struck a stone when it was thrown, and he picked up the pieces gingerly before he allowed himself the welcome relief of his own work.
36
A Talk With Quim
Josep loved to see what the advent of summer did to his vines. In Languedoc he had pruned varieties of grapes that were not as robust as the grapes native to Spain, French vines that had to be supported on expensive wire strung to posts along each row. On his own land Josep pruned as the Spanish vines had always been prepared by his family, so that each became self-supporting, shaped like a strong green vase with its branches reaching for the sun.
In contrast to his carefully tended vineyard Quim Torras’s land was a jungle, the vines poorly hacked or ignored, the weeds rampant and tall. Quim seemed to be avoiding Josep, perhaps out of embarrassment. Nivaldo told Josep that his neighbor was eating evening meals more or less regularly at the grocery. Twice, Josep met him in the lane and paused as if to talk, but Quim hurried by, his eyes red and his glance averted, and both times Josep saw that his walk was unsteady.
So Josep was surprised but pleased late one evening when Quim knocked on his door and appeared to be serious and sober. Josep greeted him warmly and ushered him inside. He offered bread and chorizo and cheese, but Quim shook his head and thanked him faintly.
“There is something I need to discuss.”
“Of course.”
Quim appeared to be searching for the proper way to begin. Finally, he sighed and blurted the words. “I am leaving Santa Eulália.”
“Going away, Quim? For how long?”
Quim smiled faintly. “For always.”
“What?” Josep looked at him in concern. “Where are you going?”
“I have a cousin in San Lorenzo de El Escorial, a fine woman to whom I’m devoted. She has a laundry in San Lorenzo, doing washing for nobles and the wealthy, a good business. She is growing old. Last year she urged me to come and live with her, to help her operate the laundry. At that time I told her I couldn’t go. But now…”
“Are you allowing Angel to run you out of our village?” Josep got along well with Angel, but he didn’t admire his treatment of Quim.
Quim dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand. “Angel Casals is of no importance.” He looked at Josep. “San Lorenzo is not close to Madrid, but it is not too far, and I will be able to meet with Father Felipe on occasion. You see?”
Josep saw.
“…And what will become of your vineyard, Quim?”
“I shall sell it.”
Josep thought he understood. “You desire me to deal with Angel for you?”
“Angel? He’s no longer looking for land for Tonio. Besides, that bastard never will own my land.”
“But…there is no one else.”
“There is you.”
Josep didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “I have no money to buy your land!” Surely Quim must realize that, he thought in annoyance. “It takes every penny I have to make the payments to my brother and his wife,” he said bitterly. “After I sell the grapes, I have little left for luxuries like food. Wake up, man!”
Quim looked at him stubbornly. “Work my land the way you work your own, sell the grapes. I won’t make life difficult for you. I need a little money now, and a little money when you harvest the first crop of grapes from my land, just so I can get started in San Lorenzo. After that, whenever you have a bit to spare, send it to me. I don’t care if it takes you many years to pay me for the vineyard.”
Josep was frightened by this new complication, sensing danger. He wished Quim had never knocked on his door.
“Are you drunk, Quim? Are you certain you know what you are doing?”
Quim smiled. “I am not drunk. Ah, I am not.” He patted Josep’s arm. “It is not as though I have my choice of many buyers,” he said quietly.
Josep had learned something from Rosa. “We must have a paper. We must each sign.”
Quim shrugged. “So, bring me a paper,” he said.
37
Rites of Passage
He sat at his table for most of the night, the oil lamp throwing yellow light and dark shadows crazily about the room as he shifted about in his chair, reading and restudying his copy of the agreement that had allowed him to buy his land from Rosa and Donat.
Finally he got ink powder, a dull pen nib in a wooden holder, and two pieces of folded paper, all taken from a small box in which his father had put them away, who knew how long ago. One of the pieces of paper had started out white, and the other was brown and somewhat wrinkled; he didn’t care which he would give to Quim and which he would keep. He placed a little of the black powder in a cup, added water, and stirred it with a stick of dried vine until it became ink.
Then he began to copy most of the document that had been prepared by Rosa’s cousin, the attorney. Josep was not an experienced scribe. He clutched the pen almost desperately. Sometimes the point of the nib caught in the surface of the paper, sending a little spray of ink next to the word he was writing. Several times he neglected to brush the dipped nib against the rim of the cup to release excess ink, which left fat, black blots on the paper, twice obliterating
half a word, so that he had to cross out the remaining letters and write the word again. Long before he was half through transcribing the first copy, he was sweating and exceedingly cranky.
He spent a long time thinking about a fair price for Quim’s land. The Torras vineyard had been neglected and poorly tended by several generations of growers, and it didn’t seem fair to Josep that the tract would be worth as much as his family’s carefully husbanded piece. At the same time, he knew that Quim was letting his vineyard go to him under terms that were incredibly generous. In the end, he valued the Torras land as equal to the price he had paid for his father’s property, without the fraternal discount he had demanded and received from Donat as his right, and he copied the first agreement verbatim except for four changes. The names of buyer and seller were different, the date was different, and he omitted any mention of the frequency with which payments would be made, or any indication that there would be a penalty for missed payments.
Quim couldn’t read. Josep read the document to him slowly, in a voice that was too loud. From time to time he stopped and asked if Quim had any questions, but there were none. Quim had learned to print his own name, and when Josep had finished he picked up the pen, dipped it in the ink, and scrawled the letters on both copies.
Josep signed also, and then he counted out the first payment and handed it over. The transaction seemed unreal and perhaps unjustified; he felt guilty, as though he were bilking his neighbor of the Torras family property.
“Are you certain, Quim? We can still tear this up and call it off.”
“I’m certain.”
Josep gave Quim the contract written on the white paper and kept the copy on the brown paper for himself.
Two days later, he harnessed Hinny and drove Quim to Sitges, where Quim would take an ox-pulled diligéncia west. The coach made many stops and was far slower than the train, but it was also much cheaper. It was owned and driven by an old friend of Quim’s, Jonatán Cadafalch, to whom Quim introduced Josep. “When you wish to send me a message,” he said—by which Josep knew he meant, when you wish to send me a payment—“give the message to Jonatán, and he will see that it reaches me.”
Quim and he had never been close, but Josep was curiously moved when they said goodbye. Quim was a bad and careless farmer and a sot, but also a good soul, a merry spirit, a forgiving and easy neighbor, a link to his childhood and to his father. They exchanged a long, tight abrazo.
Then Quim gave Jonatán his bag and climbed into the diligéncia, along with another man and a pair of elderly nuns. Jonatán clambered onto his seat, took the reins, cracked his whip, and the oxen pulled the carriage away.
When Josep returned home, he saw to Hinny’s comfort and then went into the vineyard.
It was strange.
A paper signed, a little money handed over, and the invisible boundary between the Alvarez vineyard and the Torras vineyard had disappeared.
Yet he knew that in his mind the boundary would always remain, fainter and no longer forbidding, but a marking off place between his father’s land…
…And his own new land.
He ventured into what used to be his neighbor’s vineyard and studied the morass of wild growth with new dismay. It was one thing to note with dispassionate disapproval the neglect of someone else’s crop and quite another to face the realization that he now owned responsibility for the rampant weeds that were sucking food and moisture from the vines.
Quim had simply walked away leaving multiple problems, his tools dull and needing oil, his house a stinking mess, his vines fighting for light and air.
Josep would have to deal with everything, but he knew his priority. In his own toolroom he found his father’s scythe and a file, and he sharpened the blade until it was dangerous to test it with his finger.
Then he took off his shirt and carried the scythe into Quim’s vineyard. In a moment he began the shearing, the blade brought high, his arms swinging it down to hiss as it cut, lifting as it passed through, pulling it back high again to make another arc. Josep mowed smoothly…swing…swing…swing. He marched forward slowly and steadily, leaving behind him a cleared space between the rows of vines.
The next day he harnessed Hinny to the plow and turned over and broke up the soil in the mowed areas. Only then was he able to get to the most laborious work, ripping out by hand the grasses and weeds that had crowded in close to the vines. Slowly, the plants emerged as he pulled and pulled, and he was struck by the fact that so many of them were old. Most of the grape farmers he knew replaced their vines about every twenty-five years—when, in human terms, they were middle-aged and past the years of their greatest grape production. His father had replaced plantings in the rows that were easiest to reach, willing to keep old vines on the hard to work places, the slopes and difficult corners. Quim’s family had seldom replaced a plant. Josep estimated that some of the vines he freed from the weeds were a hundred years old. Although they still produced small grapes with a wondrous depth of flavor, the vines were gnarled and crooked, like bleached driftwood logs that had been cast up on the beach—old men lying there to bake in the sun.
It took him several more days of hand weeding before he reached the outer limits of the vineyard. When he paused to pull a kerchief from his pocket and wipe his wet face, he looked back with satisfaction at a vineyard transformed, plantings no longer attacked by a jungle.
He glanced over into the neighboring vineyard at the matching neatness of the Vall property. Neither Francesc nor Maria del Mar was in sight. The day before he had seen Maria del Mar pausing at her work to watch him, and they had waved. She would be itching to know why he was tending the Torras vines and worried to think that Quim had met with a calamity. He knew that the next time they saw one another, she would walk over to him and ask. He wondered how she would feel to learn they were abutters.
Now the world of his labor had been doubled, and he quickly became accustomed to walking the long rows without pausing when he reached the end of the Alvarez vineyard and entered what he would forever think of as the Torras piece.
As the days grew longer and hotter and the grapes formed and grew, he knew that he had best deal with Quim’s abandoned house before the anxious harvest season crept up on him.
The house was a disaster.
He hauled trash—a basket full of fermented and spoiled grain from the attic, filthy clothes, blackened rags not worth washing, two stinking sleeping pads. All of it went into a pile that he sprinkled with oil and set afire. He sharpened Quim’s cutting tools and oiled the handles of hoes, shovels, and rakes. He salvaged whatever he could: a pair of barrels that appeared to be sound, broken shards of wood that could feed his fire in the winter; a basket full of nails, screws, two awls, a thimble, and one rusted hinge; a large sack half-filled with corks; a small copper cooking pot and a rusted iron fry pan; and thirty-one bottles of different shapes and design, some of them still crusted with the river mud from which Quim had salvaged them. Then he found a box containing seven dusty wine glasses. When they were washed he saw that they were old and beautiful, made of a fragile green glass. One of them was badly cracked, and he threw it away. The other six he treasured.
When Quim’s casa was empty, he left the door and the windows opened wide for ten days and then started using the house as a combination toolroom and warehouse. It was handy being able to go a short distance to get whatever he needed while he was working in the Torras piece.
In Sitges to buy a bag of sulfur, he met up on the street with Juan, the elderly worker at Emilio Rivera’s cooperage, and he paused politely to pass the time of day. Juan spoke of the busyness of the work at the cooperage, the heat of the season, the lack of rainfall. He peered at Josep.
“Emilio tells me you are not married.”
Josep peered back at him.
“I have a niece. Married only six years, and now six years a widow. Juliana.”
Josep cleared his throat. “Children?”
“Alas, no children.”<
br />
“Er…How old?”
“Still young. Strong. Can bear children, you understand! Can help a man in his work. A very good worker, Juliana…I have told her about you.”
Josep looked at him dumbly.
“So. Would you like to see her?”
“…Well. Why not?”
“Good. She is a waiter in a café, very near here. I will buy you a wine,” Juan said grandly.
Josep followed him nervously.
The café was a workingman’s place and crowded. Juan led him to a scarred table and in a moment touched his hand.
“Psst.”
Josep registered that she was older than he was, with a voluptuous body that had begun to sag, and a pleasant, good-humoured face. He watched her exchanging badinage with four men at a nearby table. She had a high, coarse laugh.
As she turned toward them, Josep felt a rising panic.
He tried to tell himself that this was an opportunity. That he had wanted to meet new women.
She greeted Juan warmly with two kisses, calling him uncle. He performed the introduction gruffly: “Juliana Lozano. Josep Alvarez.”
She smiled, made a little dip of a bow. When they ordered wine, she left at once and brought it. “You like white bean soup?” she asked Josep.
He nodded, though he wasn’t hungry. But she hadn’t been talking about the café menu. “Tomorrow night. I give you white bean soup, yes?” She grinned at him, warm and easy, and he grinned back.
“Yes.”
“Good. The house across the street, second floor,” she said. “The middle door.”
Clouds hid the moon the following evening. The street was poorly lighted by a flickering streetlamp, and the stairway of her house proved to be even darker. Carrying a long pa as his share of the dinner, he went up the stairs in semi-darkness to a narrow corridor and tapped at the middle door.
Juliana welcomed him with good cheer, accepted the bread, broke it with a couple of twists, and placed it on the table.
