The Winemaker (33 page)

“Bona tarda, Josep!” Eduardo called.

“Bona tarda, Josep!” Francesc echoed.

“Bona tarda, Eduardo. Bona tarda, Francesc,” he answered heartily, his knife cutting too swiftly and almost blindly, doing damage to a perfectly sound vine.

He lay awake most of the night, staring into darkness.

Well, he must feel happy for Maria del Mar, he tried to tell himself.

Several times she had spoken to him about the kind of man she dreamed might some day come into her life. Someone who was gentle and who would treat her with kindness. A steady man who would not run away. Someone who was a good worker, someone who would be a good father to her son.

In short…serious Eduardo Montroig. Perhaps not a man with a sense of humor, but a good person and a community leader, a man with standing in the village.

In the morning Josep returned to his pruning chores, yet desperation and fury was rising within him as relentlessly as an ocean tide, and midmorning he dropped the knife and strode to her vineyard.

She was nowhere in sight on her land, and he struck the door.

When she opened it, he didn’t answer her greeting.

“I want to share your life. In every way.”

She looked at him with astonishment.

“I…have the strongest feelings for you. The strongest feelings!” Now she understood, he saw. Her mouth quivered—was she stifling laughter at him, he thought, panicking—and she closed her eyes.

He went on, his voice breaking, no more able to control his emotions or his words than a bull in the midst of a clumsy charge straight at the point of the sword. “I admire you. I want to work with you every day and sleep with you every night. Every night, and never again to fuck as if we were each just doing a favor for a friend. I want to share your son, who also has my love. I will give you other children. I want to fill your belly with children.

“I offer you half of my two sections. They have debt, but both are valuable, as you know.

“I need you. Mirimar, I need you and I want you to be my wife.”

She was very pale. He saw she was summoning strength, gathering herself to destroy him. There was moisture in her eyes, but her voice was steady when she answered him.

“Oh, Josep…Of course.”

He had steeled himself for refusal, and at first he couldn’t accept the words.

“You must calm yourself, Josep. Of course I want you. Surely you must know that,” she said.

Her mouth trembled as she smiled at him, and for the rest of his life he would never be able to decide whether her smile of tenderness also contained the gleam of victory.

51

Plans

He held both her hands in his, unable to let her go, and covered her face with the kind of kisses given to a woman by a cherishing father or brother. What such kisses said to her was new, which made them exciting, though when his mouth found hers there was no doubt that they kissed as lovers.

“We must go to the priest,” she said faintly. “I want you somehow bound to me before you come to your senses and run far away.” But her smile told him she wasn’t worried over that possibility.

Padre Pio was not surprised when he learned they wanted to marry.

“Where were you baptized?”

He was pleased when they both told him it had been in the church he now served as pastor.

“Is there any need for haste?” he asked Maria del Mar, not dropping his gaze below her face.

“No, Padre.”

“Good. Some in the Church believe that whenever it is possible, an engagement between rigorous Catholics should last a full year,” the priest said.

Maria del Mar was silent. Josep grunted and shook his head slowly. He met Padre Pio’s gaze without defiance but without timidity.

The priest shrugged. “When the marriage involves a widow, so long an engagement is not so important,” he said coolly. “But we are already two-thirds into
Lent. Easter Sunday is April 2. Between now and the end of Easter week we shall be in our most solemn period of prayer and contemplation—not a period in which I am willing to celebrate an engagement or a wedding.”

“When shall you be able to marry us then?” Josep asked.

“I can post the banns after Easter week.…Suppose we agree that you are to be married on the last Saturday in April?” Padre Pio said.

Maria del Mar frowned. “That brings us to the season when the springtime work

in the vineyard is at its heaviest. I don’t want us to leave work to be wed and then hurry back to the vines.”

“When would you prefer?” Padre Pio asked.

“The first Saturday in June,” she said.

“You understand that between now and then you two are not to dwell together or engage in relations as man and wife?” he said sternly.

“Yes, Padre,” Maria del Mar said. “Is that date all right?” she asked Josep.

“If that is what you wish,” Josep said to her.

He was experiencing something totally unfamiliar to him, and with a shock, he recognized it as joy.

But when they were alone again, they faced the fact that the waiting period was going to be difficult. They embraced chastely.

“June 2 is ten weeks away. A long time.”

“I know.”

She cast a glance at Francesc, playing with some round stones in the dust at their feet, and moved closer so she could speak into Josep’s ear.

“I think Francesc could do well with a small one to keep his eyes on while we are working, no?”

“I agree. I would like to start another child at once.”

As they looked at one another, he allowed himself thoughts he would not share with the priest.

Perhaps she was having similar thoughts. “I think that for now we should not spend a great deal of time together,” she said. “It will be best if we limit temptation, or we will surely be carried away, and we must go to confession before the wedding.”

He agreed reluctantly, knowing she was right.

“What is the word for when people of wealth place money into a business?” she said.

He was puzzled. “An investment?”

She nodded; that was the word. “The waiting will be our investment,” she said.

Josep liked Eduardo Montroig and wanted to treat him with respect. He walked to Eduardo’s vineyard that afternoon and told him quietly and plainly that he and Maria del Mar had been to the priest and had made plans to be married.

Eduardo was betrayed by the briefest of frowns, but he stroked his long chin, and his plain face was warmed by a rare smile. “She will make a fine wife. I wish both of you all good fortune,” he said.

Josep told the news to only one other person, Nivaldo, with whom he drank a toast in honor of the news. Nivaldo was very pleased.

52

A Contest in Sitges

The Sunday following Easter, Josep and Marimar sat in church with Francesc between them, and listened to Padre Pio.

“I publish the banns of marriage between Josep Alvarez of this parish and the widow Maria del Mar Orriols of this parish. If any of you know just impediment why these persons should not be joined together in Holy Matrimony, you are to declare it.

“This is the first time of asking.”

He had placed the banns on the church door and would read them for two more Sundays, after which they would be formally engaged.

After the service, while the priest stood at the church door greeting his congregants and Francesc sat on the bench in front of the grocery eating a sausage, Josep and Marimar stood in the placa and received the good wishes, embraces, and kisses of their fellow villagers.

Josep used a steady diet of labor to fill his life during the long and impatient days of the engagement. He finished the vines and returned to his work in the cellar, completing three-quarters of the stone retaining wall by the first Friday in April, the day of the castelling tournament. He had haunted marketplaces and had found thirty more wine bottles. Washed, filled with dark wine, and labeled, they were wrapped in newspaper sheets and stowed on blankets in the back of the wagon, sharing the space with Francesc. Marimar sat next to Josep as he drove to the marketplace in Sitges.

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.