The Winemaker

by Noah Gordon

  He was seated without ceremony and served the spicy bean soup at once, which both of them ate with enthusiasm. Josep complimented her on her cooking, and she smiled. “I brought it home from the café,” she said, and they both laughed. They talked sparingly of her uncle Juan, Josep relating to her the kindnesses Juan had shown to him at the cooperage.

  Presently, even before he moved to kiss her, Juliana led him to the bed as matter-of-factly as she had served him the soup.

  Before midnight he was making his way home again, his body lighter and released but his mind curiously burdened. It had been, he thought, rather like eating a piece of fruit that had proved to be edible and without fault but was undeniably less than sweet, and he rode hunched and brooding as he and Hinny made their way over the road leading back into the countryside.

  38

  Harvesting

  Josep understood the puzzlement of some of the villagers. He had left Santa Eulália a jobless boy. When he returned, he had gained control of his father’s vineyard, and now he had the Torras property as well.

  “Are you able to work both pieces of land by yourself?” Maria del Mar asked him doubtfully.

  He had given it thought. “If you and I continue to work together to harvest our crops, as we did before, I’ll hire somebody to pick the grapes from Quim’s vines. One picker should be enough, since the Torras crop will be much smaller than either of ours,” he said, and she agreed.

  He had his choice of every village youth who wasn’t a first son, and he chose Gabriel Taulé, a quiet, steady boy of seventeen years, who had three older brothers. Known to everyone as Briel, the youth looked stunned when Josep approached him with the offer of work, and he accepted eagerly.

  Josep scrubbed his wine vats and then turned to the tanks located under a roof extension at the side of Quim’s casa. What he saw when he began to clean them disturbed him, for two of the containers had areas that reminded him unpleasantly of the rotted section he had been forced to have Emilio Rivera replace on his own vat. But he told himself that it was no use worrying about problems if one was not certain they existed, and he washed the vats with water and a sulfur solution and prepared them to accept the juice of the grapes.

  As the summer turned into the autumn, and the bunches of grapes on the vines became heavy and purple-black, Josep walked among the rows every day, sampling and tasting—now the warm spiciness of a small grape from an old Garnacha vine; now the fruity, complex promise of an Ull de Llebre; now the acid tartness of one of the Sumolls.

  He and Maria del Mar agreed one morning that the grapes had reached the time of perfect ripeness, and he summoned Briel Tauré and gave him Hinny and the tumbrel to use on the Torras piece.

  He and Maria del Mar and Quim had worked well together, but Josep found that it was even better to work alone with her, because they thought alike about the tasks and harvested well in tandem, talking rarely. He had hitched her mule to his wagon. The only sound was the snick! snick! snick! of their sharp knives as they severed bunches from the vines and dropped them into their baskets. They toiled under a radiant sun, clothing soon plastering against their bodies and showing dark, intimate patches. Fransesc hovered, fetching an occasional cup of water for one of them from the clay cántir kept in the shade under the wagon, limping after the wagon to the press, or perching on the back of the mule.

  Sometimes Briel, alone and lost in the reverie of work, would allow himself a burst of song in a loud off-key chant, more a yawping and shouting than a singing, and at first when this sound reached them, Josep and Maria del Mar exchanged wry smiles. Having the large wagon was a luxury; even though Maria del Mar and Josep each cut faster than Briel, the youth filled the small tumbrel quickly. Each time he did so he shouted, and Josep was forced to drop his knife and hasten to help him muscle the fruit-filled tumbrel to the press.

  Josep was aware that during his frequent trips to the press with grapes from the Torras piece, Maria del Mar continued to work in her own vineyard alone, a contribution of her time and energy that was over and above the terms of their working agreement. He felt he must make it up to her, and at the end of the day, when he had sent Briel home and Maria del Mar had unhitched the mule and left to make her son his supper, Josep continued to work stolidly by himself in her vineyard.

  An hour later, when she came out of her house to throw the gathered crumbs from her table to the birds, she saw Josep still bent over a vine and wielding his knife.

  She walked to him. “What are you doing?”

  “My share of the work.”

  When he looked at her, he saw that she was stiff with anger.

  “You insult me.”

  “How do I do that?”

  “When I needed help to get a fair price for my work, you provided it. You said then that you did what any man would have done, your exact words. But you don’t allow yourself to accept even the slightest help from a woman.”

  “No, it’s not that way.”

  “It is exactly that way. You disrespect me in a way you wouldn’t do to a man,” she said. “I want you out of my vineyard until tomorrow.”

  Josep felt his own anger. Damn the female, he thought, she was twisting things, confusing him, as usual.

  He was disgusted, but he was tired and dirty and had no heart for stupid quarrels, and he cursed silently, flipped his basket into the wagon, and went home.

  The next morning for a brief time things were awkward between them, but the rhythms of the shared work soon drove away the irritated words they had exchanged the evening before. Josep continued to break off and leave whenever Briel signaled that he needed help, but he and Maria del Mar functioned together very well, and he was pleased with their harvest of her grapes.

  It was midmorning when Briel made his way to Teresa’s vineyard, and Josep knew at once from his face that something was wrong.

  “What?”

  “It is the vat, senyor,” Briel said

  When Josep saw the tank, his heart sank. It wasn’t gushing, but a steady ooze of grape juice made wet tracks down the exterior of the container. There were six vats in a line on the shady side of Quim’s house, and he studied them and then pointed to the one that looked least suspicious, though there was little to differentiate them. “Use that one,” he said.

  Late in the afternoon, while he was working, he spotted Clemente Ramirez driving his great wagon down the lane to the river to rinse out his barrels.

  “Hola, Clemente!” Josep called.

  He raced to intercept the wagon and lead Clemente to inspect the offending vats.

  Ramirez examined the wooden tanks carefully and then shook his head. “These two are gone.” He pointed. “Repairing them would be to throw good money after bad. This other vat Quim Torras can use for a few more years yet, I think.

  “I can come tomorrow and take the juice from here early, and they’ll ferment it at the vinegar plant. Of course, that means I must pay Quim a bit less for it, but…” He shrugged.

  “Quim is gone.”

  Clemente was visibly impressed to learn that Josep now owned the Torras land as well as the Alvarez vineyard. “Jesucristo, I must treat you well, for at this rate you will end up a great landowning lord and our governor.”

  Josep did not feel like a lord and a governor as he returned to work. He had known that it would take several seasons before he could build up his yield from the Torras piece. Now his return from this year’s harvest would be even less than he had anticipated, and Clemente’s assessment of the vats was the worst possible news.

  New vats were very expensive.

  He had no money for new vats.

  He cursed the day when he had listened to Quim’s pleas and agreed to buy his vineyard. He was a fool to have taken pity on a neighbor who was a raddled old drunkard and a failed and miserable farmer, he told himself bitterly, and now he was afraid that before he had truly begun as a grower of grapes, he had been ruined by Quim Torras.

  39

  Troubles


  In a fog of dull despair, Josep finished the harvest in four more days, forcing himself not to think of his problems. But the day after all the grapes had been picked and pressed, he rode Hinny to Sitges and found Emilio Rivera at his midday meal in the cooperage, his ruddy face expressing pleasure as he spooned garlicky hake-with-cider into his bearded mouth. Emilio motioned him to a chair, and he sat and waited uncomfortably for the older man to finish eating.

  “So?” Emilio said.

  Josep told him the entire story: Quim’s departure, their agreement, and the disastrous discovery of the rotted fermentation vats.

  Emilio watched him gravely.

  “So. Too far gone to be fixed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Same size as the one I repaired for you?”

  “The same size... How much would two new vats cost?”

  When Emilio told him, he closed his eyes.

  “And that’s my best price.”

  Josep shook his head. “I don’t have it. If I could get the vats replaced before next year’s harvest, I could pay you for them then,” he said.

  I think I could pay you then, he amended silently.

  Emilio pushed away the empty soup bowl.

  “There are things you must understand, Josep. It’s one thing for me to give you a hand in fixing a wagon, or to help you replace a door for a church. I did those things gladly because I saw that you are a good fellow, and I like you. But…I’m not a rich man. I work hard for my living, as you do. Even if you were my sister’s son, I would not be able to use prime oak to make two large vats for you without receiving any money. And,” he added delicately, “you are not my sister’s son.”

  They sat unhappily.

  Emilio sighed.

  “Here is the best I can do for you. If you pay me now for one of the tanks—in advance, so I can use your money to buy the wood—I’ll build both vats for you, and you may pay me for the second one after next year’s harvest.”

  Josep nodded in silence for a long time.

  He tried to thank Emilio as he rose to leave. The cooper waved him away, but came after him before he had reached the door.

  “Wait a moment. Come with me,” he said, and led Josep across the cooperage and into a crowded storeroom. “Do you have any use for these?” he asked, pointing to a pile of casks, less than half the size of regular barrels.

  “…Well, I could use them. But—”

  “Fourteen of them, one hundred liters each. Made two years ago for a man who wanted them for anchovies. He died, and they’ve been here ever since. Everyone wants 225-liter barrels. Nobody’s willing to take 100-liter barrels off my hands. If you can use them, I’ll add a little something to your bill.”

  “I don’t really need them. I can’t afford them.”

  “You can’t afford to refuse them, either, because I’m practically giving them to you.” Emilio picked up one of the small barrels and thrust it into Josep’s hands. “I said a little something. It will be a very little something. Get them the hell out of here before you leave,” he said brusquely, trying to sound like a man who was accustomed to striking hard bargains.

  It was three more weeks before Clemente Ramirez came back and took the rest of Josep’s wine. After Ramirez paid him, Josep gave Maria del Mar her share and immediately made the trip to Sitges to give Emilio the cash advance they had agreed on.

  He had a brief contest with his conscience regarding the second payment to Quim Torras. It was Quim, after all, who had gotten him into the financial trouble that made it difficult for him to sleep at night. But the older man had made it clear that he needed the money to accomplish the changes in his life, and Josep knew that it had been his own responsibility to examine the tanks and the house before he had agreed to take over the vineyard.

  It bothered him to turn the payment over so trustingly to Quim’s friend, Jonatán Cadafalch. The coachman was, after all, a stranger to Josep; but Quim had claimed him as a friend, and Josep, seeing no alternative, found Cadafalch at the stage station.

  He counted the money into Cadafalch’s palm and then gave him a receipt he had written out for the transaction. He also handed over a few extra pesetas. “Please ask Quim to sign the receipt and bring it back here with you,” Josep said, “and I will give you an additional payment when I return for it.” Cadafalch glanced at him keenly but then grinned toothily to show he understood Josep’s position. Taking no offense, he stuffed the money and the receipt carefully into a leather bag, and wished Josep a good day.

  That night Josep sat at his table and placed his money before him. First he separated from the small pile the payments he would have to make to Donat and Rosa before next year’s harvest, and then, a smaller amount for supplies and food.

  He saw that what was left was meager and inadequate for any other real emergency that might arise, and he sat for a long time before sweeping the money into his cap in disgust and making his way to his bed.

  The following afternoon he sat on his bench and prepared to taste the wine he had retained for his own use out of this season’s pressing, in the hope that a miracle had taken place to make it wonderful. When he had worked in Languedoc, Leon Mendes had regularly insisted on an exercise following every new vintage. Each of his workers was given a cup of the wine, and with each sip would announce in turn some subtle flavor detected in mouth or nose.

  “Strawberry.”

  “Fresh-cut hay.”

  “Mint.”

  “Coffee.”

  “Black plums.”

  Now Josep sipped his own wine and found it already spoiled, sour and unpleasing, tasting of strong ashes and the acidity of spoiled lemons. Also tasting of disappointment, though his expectations had not been high. As he poured the rest of the cup back into the pitcher, the first note of the churchbell drifted into his consciousness, loud and startling.

  Another note followed. And another.

  A slow, solemn tolling, telling the villagers of Santa Eulália that life was hard and fleeting and sad, and that that one of their own had left their community of souls.

  He did what he had done all his life at the sounding of the death toll; he walked to the church.

  The church door would have a first small hole marring its finish, for the mortality notice was tacked to it. Several people had already read the notice and turned away. When Josep reached it he saw that the new priest, in a fine, legible hand, had written of the death of Carme Riera, Eduardo Montroig’s wife.

  Carme Riera had had three miscarriages and a fourth pregnancy in the three-and-one-half years of her marriage. On that quiet November morning she had begun to bleed without pain and presently she gave birth to a two-month-old speck of bloody tissue, after which the clear fluid leaking from her turned into a gentle red flow. That had happened the second time she had lost a child, but this time the flow of blood didn’t stop, and she had died late in the afternoon.

  That evening Josep went to the Montroig home, which was the first of the four houses located in the placa, just beyond the church. Maria del Mar was among other people who sat quietly in the kitchen, lending their presence.

  Two candles shedding yellow light at her head and two more at her feet, Carme lay on her own bed, which had been transformed into a bier by drapes of black cloth that the church kept for successive use in houses of misfortune. She was five years younger than Josep, who scarcely knew her. She had been a somewhat attractive girl with squinting eyes and a heavy bosom from early girlhood, and now her hair was washed and combed, her face white and sweet. She looked as though at any moment she might yawn. The small bedroom was crowded with her husband and several relatives who would sit with her all night, and with a pair of plañideras, old women who had been hired to weep for her. After a while Josep made room for others to view her and returned to sit stiffly in a room that at times seemed loud with whispers and hushed voices. Maria del Mar had already gone. Space was limited and chairs were few, so he did not stay overly long.

  Josep was saddened. H
e liked Eduardo and found it hard to look at the grief that contorted Montroig’s solemn, long-jawed face and robbed it of its usual serious serenity.

  The following morning, no one worked. Most of the villagers walked behind the coffin as it was carried the short distance to the church for the first funeral conducted in Santa Eulália by Padre Pio. Josep sat in a back row throughout the long Requiem Mass. By the time the priest’s calm and sonorous voice recited the rosary in Latin, and the words of the prayer were repeated by the choked voices of Eduardo and Carme’s father and her sister and three brothers, Josep’s troubles had become very small.

  40

  What the Pig Knew

  His first work of the cleanup that always followed the harvest was to disassemble the two defective vats. He took them apart as carefully as once they had been put together, probably by a Torras ancestor who had enjoyed far more skill than Josep did. That man had used very few nails, and Josep took great pains not to bend them when he pulled them free of the wood. He straightened any nail that did bend and saved each of them, because nails like these—bits of steel hand-forged to be hard and efficient, like a farmer’s life—were expensive.

  As he freed the boards, he separated them into two piles. The boards that were riddled with rot would be cut up for firewood, but a number of boards were sound and he stacked them separately, the way he had seen Emilio stack wood at the cooperage, with small sticks of wood keeping them apart from one another so air could keep them dry.

  In less than a day, the two failed tanks were gone, and he was free to begin the labor he loved best, walking behind the plow to steer the blade while Hinny pulled it through the stony soil.

  He had almost finished ploughing the Alvarez piece, when he passed the patch of brush and thistle into which the boar had plunged after he had shot it. He realized he should do some work there, clean up the volunteer undergrowth and plow the soil so he could plant a few more vines; and while he was about it, he would pack soil firmly into the space below the overhang, so no wild creature could ever take refuge there again and threaten his grapes.