The Winemaker (2 page)

He had worked two years for Mendes in the vineyard, another year filling in as a cellarman, and a fourth year in the barrel room, blessed with the opportunity to taste wines whose qualities he had never imagined. “Languenoc is known for decent vin ordinaire. I make honest wine, somewhat better than ordinary. Occasionally, through poor fortune or stupidity, I make rather poor wine,” Monsieur Mendes had told him, “but
most of the time, thanks to heaven, my wine is good. Of course, I have never made a
great
wine, a wine for the ages, such as the vintages created by the fabled wine-makers like Lafite and Haut-Brion.”

But he never stopped trying. In his unrelenting search for the ultimate cru—a perfection he spoke of as “God’s wine”—whenever he achieved a vintage that spread joy over gullet and palate, he beamed for a week. “Do you detect the fragrance?” he would demand of Josep. “Do you sense the depth, the dark scent that teases the soul, the floral smell, the taste of plums?”

Mendes had given him knowledge of what wine could be. It would have been merciful to have left Josep in ignorance. The thin, sour stuff created by the vintners of his village was poor wine, he now realized. Horse piss, he told himself morosely; probably it would have been better for him to have stayed in France with Mendes and strive to make better vintages, instead of courting danger by returning to Spain. He comforted himself with the assurance that by now it must be safe for him to go home. Four years had passed without a single indication that he was being sought by the Spanish authorities.

He didn’t like the bitter realization that generations of his family had used up their lives making such bad wine. Still, they had been good people. Hard-working people. Which brought him again to his father. He tried to picture Marcel Alvarez but could remember only small, homely details—his father’s large hands, his rare smile. There was a gap from a missing lower tooth in front; the two teeth next to the gap were crooked. His father had a crooked toe, too, the small toe of his left foot, from wearing bad shoes. Some of the time Padre had worked without shoes—he liked the feeling of soil beneath
his soles and between his gnarled toes. Lying back, Josep indulged in memories, for the first time allowing himself to enter a true state of mourning, as darkness drifted into the room through its two high windows. Finally, distraught, he fell asleep among the barrels.

The next day the air turned sharper. That night Josep wrapped himself in his blanket and burrowed into a haymow in a farm field. The rotting hay was warm and made him feel a kinship with all the burrowing creatures waiting for the sun. He had two dreams that night. First the bad dream, the terrible dream. Then, mercifully, he dreamed of Teresa Gallego, and when he awoke he remembered the dream about her very clearly, in delicious, torturous detail. A waste of a dream, he told himself. After four years, no doubt she was married or working somewhere far from the village. Or both.

Mid-morning, he had a stroke of fortune when a carter gave him a ride on a wagonload of firewood pulled by two oxen with red wooden balls on the sharp tips of their horns. If a billet fell from the load, Josep would leap off and replace it. Otherwise he rode for more than three leagues atop the load in comparative luxury. Alas, that night, his third night on the road, wasn’t spent in any sort of comfort. Darkness found him afoot in wooded country, with neither village nor farmhouse in sight.

He believed that he had traveled beyond Languedoc and that the forest in which he found himself was part of the province of Roussillon. He didn’t mind the woods in daylight; indeed, during the hunting group’s existence he had enjoyed its forays into the woods. But darkness in the woods wasn’t to his liking. There were neither stars nor moon in the sky, and it made no sense to walk the forest track without being able to see. At first he sat on the ground with his back against the bole of a large pine, but the great
soft hissing of the insistent wind through so many trees soon unmanned him, and he clambered into the lowest branches of the pine tree and climbed until he was well off the ground.

He crammed himself into a crotch and tried to cover as much of himself as possible with the blanket, but it was a sorry attempt, and the cold won out as he perched in the tree in great discomfort. From the blackness around him there was an occasional sound. The hooting of a distant owl. A mournful call of doves. A high-pitched…
something…
that he imagined was the scream of a rabbit or some other creature being murdered.

Then, from the ground directly below, the rasp of bodies brushing against one another. Grunting, snuffling, a loud snort, the scrape of earth being pawed. He knew it was wild pigs. He couldn’t see them. Perhaps there were only a few, though his imagination painted a large pack. If he fell, even one boar could be lethal, with those terrible tusks and sharp hooves. Doubtless the brutes were smelling his sausages and cheese, though he knew they would eat anything. Once his father had told him that in his youth he had seen wild pigs tear into and eat a living horse with a broken leg.

Josep clung tightly to the tree branch. After a time he could hear the pigs moving away. Everything was quiet again and shivering cold. It seemed to him that the dark lasted forever.

When daylight finally arrived, he didn’t see or hear animals, and he came down from the tree and breakfasted on sausage as he walked the narrow road. The sleepless night had left him tired, but he went at his usual pace. Around noontime the trees thinned and then there were fields and a good glimpse of the higher mountains ahead. An hour or
so later, when he had gained the Pyrenees, it began to rain very hard, and he took refuge through the open door of a barn attached to a handsome masia.

Inside the barn a man and his son stopped mucking out their cows’ bedding and stared. “So what is it?” the man said brusquely.

“Passing through, monsieur. If I can wait in here for a few moments, until the worst of the rain is gone?” Josep saw that the man was looking him over carefully, clearly less than pleased with what the rain had brought him.

“All right then,” the farmer said, moving slightly so he could continue using his sharp hay fork while watching the stranger.

The rain continued to teem. In a little while, instead of just standing, Josep picked up a shovel that was leaning against the wall and began to help the other two in their work. Soon they were listening with interest as he told them about the wild pigs.

The farmer nodded. “Mean bastards, those damned swine. And they breed like rats. They’re everywhere.”

Josep worked with them until the whole barn was mucked. By that time, the farmer was mollified and friendly and said he could sleep in the barn if he liked. So he spent that night cozy and dreamless, with three large cows giving off heat on one side of him and a great pile of warm dung on the other side. In the morning, while he was filling his water bottle in the spring behind the house, the farmer told him that he was just west of a heavily used pass through the mountains. “It is where the mountain range is thinnest. It is a low pass and you could walk across the border in three and one-half days. Or, if you go west for two leagues you come to a higher pass. Few people use it, for it is a good deal longer than the other pass. It would take you an extra two days, and you would
walk through some snow, but it is not deep…Also, on the high pass there are no guards at the border,” the farmer added knowingly.

Josep dreaded border guards. Four years before, in order to avoid the border guards, he had stolen into France, trying to follow faint trails through the mountain forest, lost much of the time, expecting at any moment to slip into a chasm, if border guards didn’t shoot him first. He had learned then that the people who lived along the border knew the best routes for smuggling, and now he took this man’s advice.

“There are four villages along the high pass at which you may seek food and shelter,” the man said. “You should stop at each one for the night, even though there may still be a few hours of light that would allow walking, for outside of the villages there is neither food nor protected places to sleep. The only segment of the pass over which you must hurry, to avoid being caught in darkness, is the long walk leading to the fourth village.”

The farmer told Josep that the high pass would bring him into Spain far to the east of Aragon. “You should be safe from Carlist militiamen, though fighters in red berets move deep into the Spanish army’s territory now and again. Last July they went all the way to Alpens and killed 800 Spanish soldiers,” he said. He looked at Josep. “Are you involved in that disagreement, by chance?” he asked carefully.

Josep was tempted to tell him he had almost worn the red beret himself, but he shook his head. “No.”

“That’s good sense. Jésus, you Spanish couldn’t have more terrible enemies than when you fight each other,” he said, and Josep was tempted to take offense but, after all, wasn’t it true? He contented himself to say that civil war was hard.

“What is all the killing about?” the man asked, and Josep found himself giving this farmer a lesson in Spanish history. How, for a long time, only royal first sons had been allowed to inherit the Spanish monarchy. How, before Josep had been born, King Fernando VII, having watched three of his wives die without a babe, was given two daughters in succession by his fourth wife, and persuaded the Cortes to change the law in order to name his first-born, Isabella, as the future queen. This had made piss-mad his younger brother, the infante Carlos Maria Isidro, who would have inherited the kingdom from Fernando.

How Carlos had rebelled and fled into France, while in Spain his conservative followers had joined together to form an armed militia that had been fighting ever since.

What Josep didn’t say was that the struggle had caused him to flee from Spain himself and had cost him four years of his life.

“I don’t give a damn whose royal cul covers the throne,” he said bitterly.

“Oh, aye, what good does it do a sensible common man to fret about such things?” the farmer said, and he sold Josep a small ball of cheese made from cow’s milk at a very good price.

When he began to walk through the Pyranees, the high pass turned out to be little more than a narrow, twisty path that rose and fell, rose and fell. He was a mote in unending vastness. The mountains stretched before him, wild and real, sharp brown peaks with white caps, fading into blue well before the horizon. There were sparse forests of pine, interspersed with naked cliffs, tumbled rocks, contorted earth. Sometimes
at an elevated height he stopped and stared, dreamlike, at a stunningly revealed vista. He feared bears and wild pigs but met no animals; once, far-off, he saw two groups of deer.

The first village he came to was no more than a tiny cluster of houses. Josep paid a coin to sleep on the floor of a goatherd’s hut, next to the fire. He spent a miserable night because of tiny black vermin, bugs that supped on him at their leisure. The next day, he scratched a dozen itchy spots as he walked.

The second and third mountain villages were larger and better. He slept one night near a kitchen stove, and the next night on a workbench in a cobbler’s shop, bugless and with the rich, strong scent of leather in his nostrils.

He started out early and energetically on the fourth morning, conscious of the warning the farmer had given him. In places the trail was difficult to walk but, as the man had said, only a short section, the highest point, was covered by snow. Josep wasn’t accustomed to snow and didn’t like it. He could imagine breaking a leg and freezing to death or starving in the awful white expanse. Standing in the snow, he made a single chill meal of his hoarded cheese, eating it all as if he were already starving, letting each precious bite melt slowly and deliciously in his mouth. But he neither starved nor broke a leg; the shallow snow slowed him but wasn’t a hardship.

It seemed to him that the blue mountains would march before him forever.

He didn’t see his enemies, the Carlists in their red hats.

He didn’t see his enemies, the government troops.

He saw neither any Frenchman nor any Spaniard, and he had no idea where the border was located.

He was still marching through the Pyrenees like an ant alone in the world, tired and anxious, when the daylight began to fail. But before darkness he came to a village where old men sat on a bench in front of an inn, and two youths threw a stick for a skinny yellow dog that didn’t move. “Go after it, you lazy cunt,” one of them called. The words were in Josep’s kind of Catalan, and he knew he was close to Spain.

2

The Sign

Seven days later, early on a Sunday morning, Josep reached the village of Santa Eulália, where he could have walked safely in the dark, knowing every field, every farmhouse, each tree. It appeared to be unchanged. Crossing the little wooden bridge over the Pedregós River, he noted the thinness of the trickle through the riverbed, the result of half a dozen years of drought. He went down the narrow street and through the tiny placa bordered by the village well, the communal wine press, the blacksmith’s forge, the grocery of his father’s friend, Nivaldo, and the church whose patron saint shared its name with the village. He met no one, although some people already were in the Santa Eulália Church; when he passed, he heard the quiet rumble of their voices at the Mass. Beyond the church were a few houses and the vegetable farm of the Casals family. Then, Freixa’s vineyard. After Freixa’s, Roca’s vineyard. And finally Josep reached the vineyard of his father, nestled between the Fortuny family’s white grape vineyard and Quim Torras’s plantings of black grapes.