I was foolish enough to laugh at him. ‘Some other man? What a fool you are, Carlos. How could there be some other man? Every second of my day is taken up with caring for the children, the house, the vineyards ‒’
‘And I say “Damn them all”! I am the most important thing in your life. Never forget it! If I should find that you took another man ‒ if you preferred another man, I would kill him! Yes, I mean it ‒ I would kill him. And then, perhaps, you also, my soft clever little Irish beauty, with your pale skin and your green eyes. Yes, I might kill you too.’
Then he withdrew from me with savage abruptness, as if I were a woman who had been raped, and was no longer wanted. But I could not blame him. He had sensed the emptiness within me. He reacted as most men would, with anger and frustration. And I no longer had the simplicity or the guile to charm him back. I let him go.
* *
I was much occupied with my vines that year. There were all the endless tasks which a vineyard required, the regular cycle of hoeing, weeding, pruning, fertilising. I had planted new slopes that January, and as I had promised, I named that new section for Amelia. She drove out to inspect it.
‘My vineyard,’ she said. ‘Something of mine left after I am gone.’
I looked at her in astonishment. ‘But you are the wife of Don Luis! And he has almost as many vineyards as Don Paulo. Surely all his vineyards are yours also?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He is very kind. All he has is mine. But no vineyard bears my name.’
‘But this is a very humble vineyard, Amelia. Well planted, well cared-for, thanks to Luis. But still quite insignificant.’
‘But still my own,’ she answered. She stood at the entrance to the courtyard of the vineyard house. ‘I can count the years of your life here in Jerez, Carlota. There ‒’ pointing directly in front, where the track led down to the road. ‘That is Juan, your first-born.’ She moved on a little further on the outside of the house. ‘And here, on this slope, is Martin. And from there is Francisco.’ Now she moved to the back of the house, and pointed. ‘And there I begin. The very youngest vines, just planted. Many will perish, but most will live. That is Amelia.’
That was the spring when I committed what I could only think of as a mad extravagance. I had the soil dug close to the house, and had vines planted against all the traditional methods of the vineyards. They were to grow up posts and left virtually unpruned. The posts would have lateral beams extending to the house itself, so that when the leaves came in the spring, and achieved full growth in the heat of the summer, the walls of the house would be shaded by a pergola. As winter came, the leaves would curl and die and drop, and the walls would receive the needed warmth of the winter sun. The grapes the vines bore might never be edible but they would hang there, as the symbolic grapes which hung from the vines which grew in the almizacates between the bodegas at Fernandez, Thompson. Perhaps I was, after all, being merely practical, even if somewhat wasteful of labour and materials. But Amelia knew at once what I intended. ‘Your house will have green shutters, Carlota, shady and cool.’ Then she gave it the name that stayed with it through the years. Las Ventanas Verdes. The Green Windows.’
II
The months went by, marked for me by the traditional tasks of the vineyard. My life was shaped by the vineyard as the pruning was shaping the vines themselves. On the advice of Don Luis I adopted the pruning system known as de virote, which meant that we left a shoot with no buds at a height above the head of the vine from which the branches have to grow. This ensured we would have no grapes until the fifth year, but Don Luis told me the wait was worth the time and extra money. In Jerez the vines are pruned by the method known as vara y pulgar, stick and thumb; the vara, the stick is left with seven or eight ‘eyes’ which produced that year’s grapes; the pulgar is the small shoot which will become the vara of the next year. The pruned vine grows close to the ground, receiving the benefit of the sun by day, and the warmth of the earth by night.
The blossoms came in May, a green blossom which got lighter and became yellowish as they faded; the grapes appeared in June. Before the flowering we started to prop up the branches so that the shoots should not touch the soil, which would have meant the loss of the crop; in July we propped up the branches again so that the weight of the grapes would not drag them down. If the grapes touch the soil during rain they will rot. To lift them up meant that the warm air could also circulate about them.
So much to do, even more to learn. I was in despair at the cost of it. We sprayed two or three times in May with copper sulphate and treated the vines with sulphur to prevent the oidium, the mildew. It seemed we were never free of the need to till and till again ‒ the deserpia, the cavabién, the golpe-lleno, and the fourth tilling, the bina. There the tilling might stop, and in many of the vineyards it did. But Don Luis recommended that we go on to the rebina in August when the earth was baked to a point that in some places it developed wide cracks. The rebina took out any weeds that grew after the bina and helped with the ripening of the grapes which then would contain more sugar. Luis quoted me a saying of the district: ‘He who tills the vineyard in August fills his bodega with must.’ So that year, the year of my first harvest, I borrowed more money so that I could employ labourers for the rebina.
By now I could hardly sleep at night worrying that there would be rain and the crop ruined or diminished. I bored everyone with the talk of the harvest to come. Carlos grew not only bored but impatient.
‘For pity’s sake, Carlota, stop it! What do you think I hear at the bodega all day? Do you think I want to come home to hear the same thing at night? For centuries we have done this work. We’ve had good harvests and bad harvests. Too much rain, and not enough rain. We have thousands of aranzadas in cultivation from here to Sanlucar ‒ you have a toy vineyard! You can play with it as it’s a toy, attending to every vine as if your life depended on it.’
And I snapped back at him in Spanish an adage I had learned from Mateo. ‘A la tierra, no se le puede engañar.’
‘You cannot deceive that land.’
‘Oh ‒ you’ve become the expert now, have you? Well, perhaps we can expect your help at the bodega when it comes to classifying and blending the wine!’ He slammed his glass down and left the table. Later we heard him leave the house; it was very late and he was very drunk when he returned that night. As he stumbled to the bed he fell across Pepita, who, as always, lay at its foot. There was a yelp of protest from her, and then a stream of curses in Spanish. Perhaps he drunkenly aimed a blow at her, because a low, warning growl followed; the sound frightened me. ‘Pepita ‒ quiet!’ I called. She subsided again with a sigh, as if she understood that one must occasionally suffer fools and drunken men.
‘He thought he married a lap-dog and now he finds a terrier,’ Maria Luisa observed the next morning. ‘Be careful, querida. And do not be too clever.’
My mother cut in. ‘Let her be as clever as she can. Let her learn what she can. God knows, we could have done with a little more cleverness at Clonmara. There we starved the land to find the money to try to make more money. And the land didn’t forgive. We took from it, and we didn’t give back. And it took its own revenge. Richard Blodmore told me that they are draining the big north pasture. More than eighty acres in that. It used to be a fine meadow at one time ‒ great fattening land, until the old shores crumbled, and it went boggy. Now he’s putting it back into good heart …’
She had fallen into the habit of talking of what Richard was doing at Clonmara as if it were something done for us. I wished she would not. The time before we had first-hand accounts of what was happening at Clonmara had been more peaceful. It had been a happier time before she began to blame my grandfather for what he had done in his zeal to make money so that we could be provided for. But then, she hadn’t the searing knowledge of the woman living at Arcos; she didn’t know the reason why this house had been bought, why the vineyard had been bought. She didn’t know the true reason why we were in Jerez at all.
>
* *
So while I worried about my harvest, the events of the world outside passed me by. I only dimly heard the reports of the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his morganatic wife, Sofia, at a place with the unpronounceable name of Sarajevo. When that happened in June I was busy arranging for the propping up of the vines; in July, while the embassies of the world hummed with activity, I thought only about how I could find enough workers for the harvest I expected in September. If I ever saw a newspaper, I don’t remember paying much heed to the stories of the ultimatums passing between one country and another. Few people in those days knew who was in alliance with whom, and for what reasons, and why anyone should go to war over them. In Jerez, we were concerned with our vines, and coming hopes of the harvest. At the end of July, Austria declared war on tiny Serbia, a country I didn’t know existed. I was trying to get enough baskets for the grapes of the harvest, and enough grass mats to lay out the grapes for ripening and sweetening in the sun. August was our vital month. There must be no rain; the grapes were swelling and thickening on the vine. I read, with a faint sense of disbelief, that in swift succession in early August Germany declared war on Russia, and then on France. Belgium was invaded. On August the fourth, when I returned from an inspection of the vineyards, taken there and driven back by Don Luis, he said, as he handed me down from the carriage and waited for Pepita to jump down, ‘Be prepared for bad news.’
I didn’t understand him. I ran inside. My mother and Maria Luisa were in the drawing-room, my mother drinking brandy. ‘These Spanish papers, they don’t tell you anything,’ she said.
Maria Luisa shrugged. ‘What is it to us? We will not go to war.’
‘War? What war?’
My mother raised her glass to me. ‘England, my darling, is about to declare war on Germany ‒ so that means Ireland too.’
I could only, stupidly ‒ not yet shaken out of my concern about the harvest, how much must I would be able to send to the bodega, how much I would be able to repay on my loans ‒ question, ‘Why?’
‘Why? Good question, Charlie. Every woman in the world who knows about it must be asking that question now. Something the men have arranged. They’re great arrangers, the men. This time they’ve arranged a little war. Just to keep everyone busy.’
She was drunk, of course. And yet something very calm and cold at the centre of what she was saying bore into me.
‘What will happen?’
‘For us, Charlie, probably very little. But the men we have known, all the sons of the fathers we knew, all the boys you went hunting with, will probably go off to war. They’ll probably take their own horses.’ She waved her glass at me. ‘How do I know ‒ I don’t even know if men go to war on horses these days. Perhaps those motor cars have taken over. But how will they pull the guns without horses? Believe me, Charlie, Clonmara will sell every horse it can spare. I only wish we had a whole stableful to sell here.’ Then her face crumpled. ‘But I would never sell a horse for war, Charlie ‒ never. I would never sell a horse for war!’
I sat in silence for a while, thinking about what she had said. ‘Will … will everyone in Ireland go to war?’ It was still a strange and far-off thing to me, this war.
‘Every able-bodied gentleman will volunteer immediately,’ my mother said. ‘The others, the ones like Andy’s brothers, will go because they’ve always fought in England’s wars. They were here in Spain with Wellington, they were in the Crimea, they fought the Boers ‒ when Uncle Bertie got killed. They’ve been fighting for the English for centuries, when they weren’t rebelling against them.’
I went and poured a brandy from the decanter. I took a long gulp at it before I asked the question whose answer I already knew. ‘Do you think Richard … do you think Richard Blodmore will go?’
‘Very likely. It would be expected of him.’
Now Maria Luisa broke in. ‘But your husband, Lady Pat, is already a soldier. He is already in it, isn’t he, if war comes?’
I swung around to look at her. ‘My father?’ It was perhaps the first time I had consciously thought of him as a person, with a job to do, a role to fill.
‘Yes, darling ‒ your father. Funny ‒ I hadn’t thought of him myself. He’s with the 87th Regiment, King’s Own Artillery. Or something like that. I could never get it straight. But he was always riding a horse ‒ how can he be in the artillery?’
‘Guns,’ I said. ‘They pull guns with horses.’
‘Oh, yes, that’s it, of course. Of course …’ She sipped her brandy in silence, and said little the rest of the evening.
Next day we knew that England had declared war on Germany. We were safe and quiet here, in our little far left-hand corner of Europe. Spain had no obligation to anyone, and so long as ships would ply from Cadiz, we would sell our sherry.
‘In any case,’ Carlos said, ‘it will be over by Christmas.’
So I brought in my first harvest to the distant, the very far distant sound of guns thundering over the Lowlands of Europe ‒ the Lowlands which once had been an important part of the great Spanish Empire.
III
The harvest began early in September, and, for those who had large vineyards, continued for almost a month. It is a time of agony for the vineyard owner to know when to begin to cut the grapes. If he cuts too early there will be less sugar, and therefore less alcohol; if he waits he risks damage from rain. I waited until Don Luis began his own harvesting ‒ but the vineyard next to mine was only one of many he owned, and he went from one to the other, the different varieties of grapes requiring different times of harvesting. There was also his work at the bodega to attend to, so when I saw him, it was briefly. I felt lost without him, the reassurance which his experience gave me. ‘Don’t worry too much about rain,’ he said. ‘If it rains, stop harvesting and wait until the grapes dry. If they are properly staked and do not touch the ground, they are safe.’ I believed him, but still sent Nanny to the church across the plaza to light candles and pray that it would not rain.
That year I did not have the additional expense of building one of the high, rough watch towers that go up in the vineyards when the grapes grow ripe for picking, places from which the grapes are watched night and day against thieves. One watch tower on Don Luis’s property also looked over my land. ‘The men will watch for both of us,’ Don Luis said.
The grapes were cut and placed in baskets of woven olive branches. Each basket held about twenty-five pounds of grapes, and it needed sixty basketfuls to make a carretada, about the measure Mateo told me, to make one butt of must. The grapes were carried to the space in front of and around the vineyard house and laid out on esparto grass mats to dry. They stayed there from twelve to twenty-four hours, covered at night with another grass mat for protection from the dew. Then they were carried to the lagar to be pressed.
It needed four men to tread in the lagar, and they began their work about midnight, and continued on until midday the next day, so that they rested through the hottest hours of the afternoon. I had two teams of men for this, and for as long as they did not sleep, neither did I. This was no festive occasion, such as I had seen on the steps of the Collegiate church. It was hard, continuous work. One carretada at a time was tramped between those muscular legs clad in short trousers and the nailed boots. The two lagars at Las Ventanas Verdes were old, and had had to be repaired, as well as thoroughly cleansed. The pisadores worked steadily, solemnly ‒ working one side of the lagar at a time, leaning with their right hands on their wooden shovels. For them the vendimia meant only hard work, and little gaiety. The boots they wore were an important item; the pips and stalks of the grapes were trapped between the nails, and not damaged, and a soft layer of grapeskins eventually formed over the soles so that the hard pips and stalks of the grapes would not be broken. Unbroken, they could not release their tannin which could give the wine a harsh flavour. Before the treading started, the grapes were sprinkled with three or four pounds of gypsum,
which Mateo told me considerably improved the quality of the must.
I was bewildered and fatigued. I had seen various stages of these processes of the harvest and the production of the must before, but never had it been my grapes and my must. I stood there, hour after hour, watching the pisadores slowly becoming besplattered with juice, watching the flow of the must from the lagar, filtered first by an open-mesh basket to take out the stalks, and then through a sieve to get rid of the skins and pips. The precious, though rather evil-smelling liquid went into a waiting tub.
The second pressing was obtained by piling the pulp of the grapes into a sort of cylinder around a seven-foot-high steel screw fixed permanently in the centre of the lagar. The pisadores worked with their wooden shovels piling it up. Almost everything that touched the grapes was wood, lest the taint of metal contaminate the must. Again gypsum was sprinkled to give consistency to the heap. This heap they called the pie and they wound a long tape of esparto grass around it, both ends fastened to wooden blocks. One block was attached to the lagar at the bottom of the pie, the other at the top. The top one dovetailed into another piece of wood which fitted around the central screw. Mateo called these two pieces marranos ‒ pigs. They were separated by a metal washer from the big nut which rotated on the screw. This was called the marrana, the sow. I understood why when I heard the grunting noise it made when the great screw, fixed to a massive steel handle more than two yards long was turned. When this turned, the juice of the second pressing squeezed through the esparto grass band, and down through the opening into the tub.
Any romantic notions I still had of the harvest were gone. At first this second pressing was quite easy. Two men, called tiradores, could manage it easily. Then it grew harder and harder, and two more tiradores joined in, two pushing, two pulling. It became impossible to turn the screw continuously. The men had even to tie their wrists to the handle for fear of slipping; I watched those huge muscles strained to the limit, and knew what a fall might mean. To watch them do it yet again was agony, but they did it, rebuilding the pie, pressing it once more. The grapes were forced to yield all they could give, and the men had to work through the night to take the must from them. This then was the end of all the long months of labour in the vineyard, under the rain and the broiling sun, the planting, tilling, pruning, propping, spraying. This was the cost of the bright wine in our glasses. The sweat of the men, their straining muscles, the almost unbearable smell of the must ‒ I began to think it was too much to pay for the smooth, golden liquid.
The Summer of the Spanish Woman Page 26
