The Winemaker (23 page)

With new knowledge of how long he needed to spend each day making the door, he was able to work five or six hours in the vineyard before leaving for Sitges. This
meant that it was almost dusk before he could leave the cooperage and ride Hinny back onto the road to the south, but it was worth it to get the extra few hours with the vines, and he found it pleasant to ride back to the village through the darkness and cool night air.

On the third evening, as he left Sitges, his route took him through a section of small houses along the waterfront. Most were the homes of fishermen, but in front of one house women stood and spoke soft invitations to passing men.

He was sorely tempted but repelled, for most of them were hard-looking, unattractive females whose garish cosmetics could not disguise how pitilessly they had been used by life. So he had ridden past one of the women before something about her features struck a chord of memory, and he turned Hinny and came back to her.

“Lonely, senyor?”

“Renata? Is it you?”

She wore a wrinkled black dress that clung to her, and a dark kerchief knotted about her head. She had lost weight and her body appeared more seductive but she looked older than her age and terribly tired. “Yes, I am Renata.” She peered at him. “Who is it, then?”

“Josep Alvarez. From Santa Eulália.”

“From Santa Eulália. You wish my company, Josep?”

“Yes.”

“So come in here, amor meu, to my room.”

She waited while he tethered Hinny to a rail in front of the neighboring house, then he followed her up a flight of urine-scented stairs. A burly man in a white suit sat at a table at the top of the stairs and nodded to Renata as they passed.

The room was small and dirty—a sleeping mat, an oil lamp, soiled clothes heaped in two corners.

“I had been away for years. When I returned I went looking for you, but you were gone.”

“Yes.” She was nervous. Speaking rapidly, she told him what she was going to do to give him pleasure. It was obvious she didn’t remember him.

“I came to your mother’s house to see you, with Nivaldo Machado, the grocer of Santa Eulália.”

“With Nivaldo!”

He had started to disrobe and saw her reach for the lamp. “No. Leave it on, if you please, the way it was then,” he said.

She looked at him and shrugged. Hiking the hem of her dress up around her hips, she sank to the mat and waited for him.

“Won’t you at least remove the head scarf?” he said, bothered but half joking, and reaching down, he pulled it from her head as her hand moved too late to prevent him.

The front half of her scalp was bald, shiny with sweat, while the hair of the other half was matted and patchy, like dried turf.

“…What is it?”

“I don’t know. Some little illness you can’t catch from being with me this once,” she said sullenly. She reached to undo his trousers, but he moved away.

On her legs, a blotchy rash.

“Renata…Renata, I’ll wait.” He took another step back and saw her face dissolve and her shoulders begin to shake, though she made no sound.

“Please…” She looked at the door.

“He gets so cross,” she whispered.

Josep reached into his pocket and took out whatever money was there, and her hand closed over it. “Senyor,” she said, wiping her eyes, “this thing will not last long. I don’t think it is the pox, but even if it should be, the pox goes away after a month or two, and then one is all right. One is perfect again. You will come to see me after it is gone?”

“Of course. Of course, Renata.”

He went out of the room and down the stairs, and when he remounted, he kicked Hinny into a trot until they were well beyond the town.

35

Changes

When the joining of the door was completed, Josep worked hour after hour sanding the wood until it was a smooth, unbroken surface. He stained it a deep rich green, the only color Emilio Rivera had to offer him, and then finished with three coats of varnish, each layer burnished with fine-grit sandpaper until the final coat glowed and felt like glass.

He carried the finished door home in the wagon on a bed of blankets. Once it was safely in the village unmarred, he allowed the men of the church to assume responsibility for hanging it, which they did with dispatch, utilizing the bronze brackets taken from the old door.

He was reimbursed for the cost of the wood, and a small dedication ceremony was held. Padre Felipe accepted the door and gave thanks with a blessing, and the alcalde spoke warmly of Josep’s contribution of his time and energy, which embarrassed him.

“Why did you do that?” Maria del Mar asked him the next day when she met him on the road. “You don’t even go to Mass!”

He shook his head and shrugged, unable to explain it to her, just as he was unable to explain anything to her.

To his astonishment, the answer to her question suddenly came to him. He had not done it for the church.

He had done it for his village.

Five days after the new door was dedicated, two middle-aged clerics came into the village in a carriage pulled by a pair of horses. They entered the church and were inside with Padre Felipe Lopez for half a day; then they emerged alone and went into the grocery with the driver. The three men ate bread and sausage and drank well water before getting back into the carriage and riding away.

That evening, Nivaldo told Josep about the priests’ brief visit, but neither of them learned anything more for three more days, when Padre Felipe said goodby to several people and, after twelve years of service as pastor of the village church, left Santa Eulália for all time.

The gossip spread quickly and astounded the village. The riders had been monsignors from the diocesan Office of Vocations in Barcelona. The prelates had come to tell Padre Felipe that he had been summarily transferred, reassigned to become confessor to the congregation of religious women at the Convent of the Royal Barefoot Nuns, in the diocese of Madrid.

For only five days the church was without a pastor, and then one afternoon a tired old horse pulled a hired hack across the bridge, carrying a thin, saturnine priest in a wide-brimmed black hat. When the priest left the carriage, his eyes, behind the thick lenses of spectacles, slowly inspected the placa before he carried his bag into the church.

The alcalde hastened to the parish house to call as soon as he heard of the arrival, and subsequently Angel went to the grocery and reported to Nivaldo and several customers who were present that the new priest was Padre Pio Dominguez, a native of
Salamanca, who came to Santa Eulália after a decade of being an associate pastor in Girona.

That Sunday those who attended Mass found it strange to see that the black-robed figure consecrating the Eucharist was a tall and slender stranger instead of the familiar sight of the rotund Padre Felipe. In place of Padre Felipe’s alternately jolly and unctuous style, the new priest spoke sparely, his homily a puzzling story of why the Madre Maria one day had sent an angel into a poor family’s home to bring everyone the love of Jesús in the form of a jug of water that turned into wine.

It was a Sunday morning like any other Sunday morning, except that a different priest stood by the door as everyone left the church. Surprisingly few people in Santa Eulália appeared to care.

Over the next week the alcalde accompanied Padre Pio into all of the homes, calling upon the village families one by one. They reached Josep on the third day, when he was midway through the afternoon’s work. Nevertheless, he broke off what he had been doing and invited them to sit on the bench. He served them wine, watching the priest’s face as he took his first sips. Padre Pio drank manfully, but Josep took approving note that he did not try to compliment the terrible stuff.

“I think it would be a blessing, Padre, if the Madre or the Lord could once in a while turn our wine into water,” Josep said.

The priest didn’t smile, but something flickered in his eyes. “I do not believe you were in the church on Sunday, senyor.”

It was not an accusation, merely a statement of fact.

“No Padre, I was not.”

“Yet you refer to my homily?”

“In this village, each bit of news is shared and received like good bread.”

“It was Josep who made our church’s new door,” Angel said. “A handsome door, is it not, Padre?”

“Handsome, indeed. An excellent door, and your labor, a generous contribution.” Now the priest smiled. “I hope you remember that your church door opens wide.” He drank all of his wine and stood. “We will allow you to return to your work, Senyor Alvarez,” he said, as though he could read Josep’s mind.

Angel motioned with his chin toward Quim’s property. “Do you know when he will return? We tried at his house, but no one answered our knock.”

Josep shrugged. “I don’t know, Alcalde.”

“Well,” Angel told the priest distastefully, “you will no doubt see a lot of him, Padre, for he seems to be a very religious man.”

Josep liked to walk at night along the rows of vines among which he spent his days working. That was why he was at the familiar edge of his vineyard in the darkness that night, when he heard the unfamiliar sound. For a panicked moment he supposed it was another boar, but he knew at once it was raw sobbing, a human noise, and he followed it off his own property.

He almost stumbled over the body in the weedy growth.

“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