The Winemaker

by Noah Gordon

  It was the same trip as the one he and the boy had made once before, but there were notable differences. When they came to the grove of pines, Josep stopped the hinny, but this time he took Francesc into the trees so they could piss in privacy, and when they returned to the wagon, Mirimar visited the sheltering privacy of the trees.

  The trip was pleasant. Marimar was good, quiet company, and in a holiday mood. Somehow, her manner made Josep feel that he was already a family man, and he relished the role.

  When they reached Sitges, he drove Hinny directly to the location next to the seafood stand of the Fuxá brothers, who greeted him warmly but with jovial descriptions of how they would annihilate the Santa Eulália castellers in the coming tournament.

  “We’ve been waiting for you,” Frederic said, “because we used up our wine during the holiday.” Each of them bought two more bottles almost before Josep had positioned the wagon, and this time he did not have a long waiting period for other customers, as several other vendors came to buy wine and attracted a small group of shoppers to the site. Maria del Mar joined Josep in selling the wine, which she did as naturally as if she had been selling from a wagon all her life.

  Most of the people of Santa Eulália had come to the marketplace. Indeed, a large number of villagers were either climbers or members of the pinya or the baixos, the crowds that supported the bottom two rows of the castell. Most of Josep’s neighbors had come to witness or participate in the tournament, and they wandered by to watch as he sold the wine he had made in the village.

  Several people he knew in Sitges had come to support their own team, and they stopped by the wagon to greet him and to be introduced to Francesc and Maria del Mar. Juliana Lozano and her husband bought a bottle, and Emilio Rivera bought three.

  Josep sold his last bottle of wine well before everything closed down for an hour so the castelling could take place. He, Marimar, and Francesc sat on the lip of the wagonbed and ate the Fuxás’ fish stew while they watched the brothers help one another into their faixas.

  After they had eaten, Marimar held the end of the faixa while Josep turned and turned, girdling himself into a support so tight it barely allowed him to breathe.

  As they made their way through the crowd, the Sitges musicians began to play, and Francesc took Josep’s hand.

  Very soon a whining melody summoned the base of the Sitges castell and as soon as it was formed, their climbers began to mount.

  Eduardo had been right about the nature of the competition, Josep saw at once. The Sitges climbers ascended without a wasted second or an unnecessary movement, and their castell rose with swift efficiency until the boy who was their enxaneta scuttled up as the eighth layer, raised his arm in triumph, and descended on the other side, the climbers behind him deconstructing the castell as smoothly as it had been raised, to applause and shouts of praise.

  The Santa Eulália musicians, already in place, began to play. The grallas called Josep, and he slipped off his shoes and gave them to Francesc as Mirimar wished him good fortune.

  The Santa Eulália base formed quickly, and very soon it was Josep’s turn. He climbed swiftly and easily, as he had done in practice so many times, and soon he was standing on Leopoldo Flaquer’s shoulders, his arms about Albert Fiore and Marc Rubió, steadying them as they steadied him.

  Then Briel Tauré was standing on his shoulders.

  Fourth tier was not so high, yet it gave Josep a vantage point. He could not see Maria del Mar or Francesc, but in the space beneath Marc’s arm he viewed upturned faces and beyond them people who moved around the perimeter of the crowd.

  He saw a pair of nuns, one short, the other tall, in black habits with white wimples.

  A wild-haired boy lugging a squirming yellow dog.

  A fat man holding a long bread.

  A straight-backed man in a grey suit, perhaps a businessman, carrying a broad-brimmed hat. Walking with a slight limp.

  Josep knew that man.

  And he knew the the sudden fear that coursed through his own body as he watched the familiar limp.

  He wanted to run but couldn’t move, captive and completely vulnerable, imprisoned there in the air.

  His knees were suddenly without strength, so that he tightened his grip on his companions, and Albert looked at him. “All right, Josep?” Albert asked, but Josep didn’t reply.

  The man’s hair seemed still jet-black but there was a small circle of bald flesh at the very top of his head…Well, seven years.

  Then he was gone.

  Josep bent his head as low as possible while still held in the embrace of the others, peering under Marc’s arm, trying to keep the man in sight.

  In vain.

  “Something?” Marc asked sharply, but Josep shook his head and held on.

  Now there was a murmur, and people were pointing upward, where Eduardo’s surprise—an extra tier of climbers—was taking place, and then the enxaneta went skyward over Marc’s back.

  Josep knew when the boy raised his arm at the top as the ninth layer and started down, because there was a murmur from the crowd and applause.

  It was Bernat Taulé, Briel’s brother, in the seventh layer, who was a bit too eager to descend. Losing his balance, he grabbed at his nearest partner, Valentí Margal. Valentí held him, preventing a fall while the castell rippled for a moment and swayed. Eduardo had taught them well. They retained their balance, Bernat recovered and went down a bit slower than usual, and the castell finished its deconstruction without further incident.

  When Josep’s feet reached the ground, he didn’t flee but instead, shoeless, he pushed through the crowd in the direction the man had taken, trying for another sighting.

  For half an hour he searched the marketplace, but he did not glimpse Peña again.

  He scarcely registered that the judges had been arguing. The Sitges team had performed flawlessly, raising eight levels, but the Santa Eulália team had successfully built and dismantled a castell with nine levels. In the end, the judges agreed to declare the contest a draw.

  Most people appeared satisfied with the decision.

  As they rode homeward, Francesc slept in the rear of the wagon, and Josep and Mirimar spoke little. Josep felt numb as he directed the hinny. Mirimar was content to travel comfortably with her child and her intended, after a satisfying and enjoyable day. When she spoke Josep answered briefly; he perceived she didn’t think that strange, probably assuming he was gripped by the same contentment she felt.

  The thought occurred to him that perhaps he was going mad.

  53

  Josep’s Responsibility

  He sat on the vineyard bench in the lemony sunshine of early spring with his eyes closed, forcing his mind to work, trying to reason his way out of thought-paralyzing panic.

  One: Was he certain that the man he had seen was Peña?

  He was. He was.

  Two: Had Peña seen and identified him?

  Reluctantly, Josep decided that he must assume Peña had seen him. He couldn’t afford to believe in coincidence. In all probability, Peña had come to the Sitges competition in the hope of glimpsing him. Perhaps in some way he had learned that Josep Alvarez had returned to Santa Eulália, and he had needed to determine that this was the Josep Alvarez he had known and trained, the man he had been looking for, the only one of the village boys who had eluded him.

  Eluded him thus far, Josep told himself in despair.

  Thus far.

  Three: So. Somebody was going to come for him.

  Four: What were his options?

  He thought about how terrible it had been to be sought, homeless, and drifting.

  Perhaps he could sell his wine, get cash, and pay for travel in a passenger coach instead of a baggage car, he thought.

  But he knew there was not enough time for that.

  He couldn’t ask Maria del Mar and Francesc to run away with him and share a fugitive’s life. Yet if he left them behind, life would be desolate for him, and he cringed at the though
t of what a new hurt and another abandonment might do to Marimar.

  He was left with only one choice.

  He remembered the lesson Peña had driven home to him: When it is necessary to kill, anyone can do it. When it is necessary, killing becomes very easy.

  The LeMat was where he had placed it behind a sack of grain in the eaves of the attic. Only four of the nine chambers were loaded, and he had no more gunpowder. So the four shots and a sharp knife would have to serve.

  To survive fear he turned blindly to hard labor, always the best medicine for him when he was faced with trouble. He worked without stopping, building another piece of the stone wall that covered the unfinished earthen side of the cellar, and then switching off in late afternoon to prune his vines. Always, he kept the Le Mat within easy reach, though he didn’t expect Peña to march through the village and attack him in broad daylight.

  At dusk the gathering darkness in the house allowed his fear to magnify, and he took the LeMat outside and climbed the ridge to a place where the pale moonlight enabled him to see the section of the lane that approached the vineyard. It was almost pleasant to sit there, until he realized that if someone came, he surely wouldn’t take the lane. Anyone taught by Peña would be likely to circle around and come down the hill, and Josep turned and looked up the slope, feeling exposed and unprotected.

  Finally he went back to the house for blankets and carried them into the cellar, spreading them next to the wine casks and near the wheelbarrow of river clay. He lay down with his head between the wheelbarrow shafts, but before long the stones in the floor pushed into his back, and the cellar was a chill bedchamber, fine for wine but inhospitable to human flesh. Besides, it occurred to him that should trouble come, it would not be good to face it like an animal cowering in a hole in the ground.

  So he took the blankets and the gun and returned crankily to the house, where he entered his own bed and found limited and troubled sleep.

  The quality of his sleep remained poor for the next two nights. In the small early hours of the third night he finally slept more deeply, to be awakened after a time by a banging on his door.

  He struggled into his work trousers and, holding the gun, he went down the stone stairs as the French clock was chiming five o’clock, his normal rising hour. He tried to force himself to think clearly.

  No assassin would knock, he told himself.

  Was it Marimar? Perhaps the boy was sick again?

  But he could not bring himself to open the door.

  “Who is it?”

  “Josep! Josep, it is Nivaldo.”

  Perhaps someone was behind Nivaldo, holding a weapon.

  He unlocked the door, opened it a crack and peered out, but the sky was cloudy and it was still dark, so he could see but little. Nivaldo reached in, and his trembling hand clamped hard onto Josep’s wrist.

  “Come,” he said.

  Nivaldo shook his head and would not answer questions as they hurried down the lane and across the placa. He stank of brandy. His key rattled against the lock before he succeeded in opening the door of the grocery.

  When he scratched a match and lighted a lantern, Josep saw an empty brandy bottle on the counter, and then he saw at once the cause of Nivaldo’s nervousness.

  The man lay on the floor as if asleep, but the unnatural angle of his head made it apparent that he wouldn’t waken.

  “Nivaldo,” Josep said gently.

  He took the lantern from Nivaldo and bent over the form on the floor.

  Peña lay next to the overturned chair on which he had been sitting. He did not look like the prosperous businessman Josep had viewed in the Sitges marketplace; he looked more like a dead soldier, dressed as Josep remembered him in threadbare workclothes and worn military boots of good leather, a sheathed knife on his belt. His eyes were closed. His head hung at an impossible ninety-degree angle, and one whole side of his neck was a large bruise colored the purple-black of Ull de Llebre grapes, with a torn-open wound of raw meat and clotted blood.

  “Who did this?”

  “I did,” Nivaldo said.

  “You? How?”

  “With that.” Nivaldo pointed to a heavy steel bar leaning against the wall. It had always been a part of the grocery; Josep had used it himself on occasion, when he had helped Nivaldo pry open a cask of flour or a crate of coffee. “No questions now. You must get him out of here for me.”

  “Where shall I take him?” Josep said stupidly.

  “I don’t know. I don’t want to know, I don’t want to know,” Nivaldo said wildly. He was half drunk. “You must get him out of here now. I have to clean everything, set things right before people begin to come through that door.”

  Josep stared at him, befuddled.

  “Josep. Get him out of here, I said!”

  The wagon and the hinny would make too much noise. He hurried home. His wheelbarrow was in the cellar, full of clay, but the big wheelbarrow he had inherited from Quim was empty. The rusty wheels screamed when he moved it, and he was forced to spend precious moments applying oil before he was able to push the barrow through the darkness to the grocery.

  They wrapped Peña in a stained blanket, and then Nivaldo took his feet and Josep his shoulders. Death had made Peña stiff, and when they placed him on the barrow, his body was rigid enough to lie across the rim, where it would surely fall off. Josep pressed down on his waist, and despite the rigidity in the body, enough pliancy remained to allow the buttocks to fold into the cavity of the barrow.

  Nivaldo went into the grocery and closed the door, and Josep pushed his burden away.

  It was still quite dark, but throughout the village vineyard workers were already leaving their beds, and he was in an agony of concern lest he should meet someone who was up and about and ready to pass a few minutes in conversation. More than once they had witnessed Quim Torras joyously and noisily pushing his plump priestly lover in this wheelbarrow, around and around the placa. He went past Eduardo’s house, moving as fast as he was able, very conscious of sound. The oiled wheels no longer shrieked, but they were metal-bound, making a soft, rapid clacking on the cobblestoned placa and, once beyond the paved area, sending loose stones skittering.

  As he passed Angel’s field, a cock crowed and the alcalde’s dog, successor to the long-gone animal Josep had once coerced, began to bark wildly.

  Shut up, shut up, SHUT UP…

  He moved faster and finally turned into his own vineyard with great relief, but then he stopped.

  What now?

  The first grey light was still several hours away, but if he was to carry out this strange responsibility Nivaldo had thrust upon him, the body could not be buried shallowly or carelessly. Nor could he dig a grave when at any moment someone could venture down the lane to the river, or Mirimar could come seeking him.

  Somehow, he had to get Peña out of sight.

  He moved to the cellar, opened the door, and pushed the wheelbarrow inside.

  By the time he had found the lantern in the dark and scratched a match, he knew what was required.

  He worked his hands under Peña’s shoulders and dragged the body from the barrow. The yawning rent in the rock wall that Josep had thought of as a natural closet would never contain shelves of wine bottles now. Peña was a large, muscular man, and Josep grunted as he crammed him deep into the opening in a standing position, his back to the smooth rock wall, his loose head and upper chest touching a knobby rock thrusting out of the opposite, rougher wall of the fissure. The body was still bent at the waist but Josep was not interested in seeking its best appearance.

  On the previous afternoon he had added water to the river clay in his own wheelbarrow, but in the lantern light he could see that the surface of the clay had dried and cracked. He kept a cantír of drinking water in the cellar and he poured its contents onto the clay and worked it with his shovel, blending the surface with the moister interior. Then he filled a bucket with clay and scooped some out with his trowel and dropped it at the edge of the
opening in the wall. He found a good large stone and pressed it down on the clay and mated it with another stone, neatly using the trowel to scrape the excess clay that joined them, working as slowly and carefully as he had on the other areas of stonework in the cellar.

  When he had laid five courses of stone across the bottom of the opening, the top layer was the height of Peña’s knees, and Josep took Quim’s barrow out of the cellar to a pile of excavation soil that he had intended to spread on the lane. As he filled the barrow, the first grey light was filling the sky,

  When he was back in the cellar, he shoveled the stony gravel into the area behind the body. He pulled the body erect so that it no longer leaned on the wall, and positioned the fill, carefully working it around the legs and tamping it down firmly so that in death Peña stood, bent but like a planted tree held up by the soil around its roots.

  Then he went back to laying stone.

  The wall had almost reached Peña’s waist when he heard the high clear voice just outside the door.

  “Josep.”

  Francesc.

  “Josep. Josep.”

  “Josep.”

  The boy was searching for him, calling.

  He stopped working on the wall and stood and listened. Francesc continued to call, his voice quickly dwindling and then disappearing, and after a few minutes Josep resumed laying the stones.

  As the wall grew, every meter or so Josep added the fill until it reached the top layer of stone, and packed it down. When the wheelbarrow was empty of gravel, he went outside gingerly and cautiously, but he was alone in the bright dazzle of mid-morning, and he filled the wheelbarrow with another load of gravel and returned with it into the cool, lantern-lit darkness.

  He worked with methodical grimness as he raised the wall and filled the space, disregarding hunger and thirst. The dirt seemed to ascend the body like a slowly rising tide; it took a lot to fill a grave, even when the grave was turned on end. He tried not to look at Sergeant Peña. When he did look, he saw the head resting on the right shoulder, hiding the ugly bruise and the wound in Peña’s neck. He didn’t want to note the bald spot of middle age, or the few silver hairs; they made Peña too human, a victim. Under the circumstances, Josep preferred to remember him as a murdering bastard.