The Winemaker (35 page)

“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.

By the time he covered the shoulders, he was working more slowly, from a step-ladder. He added one more row of stones to the wall and then shoveled gravelly soil, the pebbles and dirt obliterating Peña’s thinning black hair, forever hiding the bald spot. Josep buried the head, added several inches of dirt, and tamped it down.

The new wall was still a meter below the stone roof when he ran out of clay, but now he felt able to go for more with reasonable safety, since anyone wandering into the cellar would see nothing untoward.

Outside, he saw from the sun it was late afternoon. He had had neither food nor drink since the previous day, and as he pushed Quim’s wheelbarrow down the lane past Marimar’s vineyard, he felt lightheaded and dizzy.

At the riverside he knelt and washed his hands. They still tasted of clay as he drank and drank of the cold water, but he didn’t care. He splashed water on his face and then took a long piss against a tree.

The clay bank was a short distance downstream from the end of the lane, but the riverside was blocked by a thick stand of brush. Josep slipped off his shoes and rolled up his trousers; then he pushed the wheelbarrow into the shallow water. He had to manhandle the barrow over some rocks, but soon he was loading clay into it.

On the way back, as he passed Marimar’s vineyard, she stepped out from behind her casa and saw him pushing another load of clay or stones from the river, as she had seen him so many times before. She waved, smiling, and Josep smiled back but didn’t stop.

On his own land he also got a fresh load of fill, and then he went back to work steadily and purposefully.

He paused only once. On impulse, he descended from his ladder and went to where the LeMat rested on one of the barrels. He took the gun and placed it atop the soil in the opening and added several shovelsful of fill.

When the last bit of soil had been crammed under the roof, he laid the top course of stones, scraped the clay binding neatly with his trowel, and climbed down from the ladder.

The rock wall began at the left of the door and ran until it became a stone wall, straight and true, where the closet opening had been. The stone wall ran under the rock ceiling for about three meters, turned right at the end to cover the width of the cellar, and then turned right again. The entire right wall was lined with stone except for a narrow unfinished section close to the door.

All the stonework matched, and the cellar seemed to exude innocence as Josep examined it in the light of the lantern.

“Now you can have him,” he said aloud and shakily.

As he closed the door behind him, he didn’t know if he had spoken to the Small Ones or to God.

54

A Conversation With Nivaldo

“You’re part of it too,” Josep said.

Nivaldo looked at him. “You want stew?”

“No.” Josep had eaten, slept, wakened, washed, eaten again. Slept again.

If you knew where to look, it was possible to see where the spilled blood had been scraped from the grocery’s dirt floor. He wondered where Nivaldo had disposed of it. Buried it somewhere, perhaps. Josep thought if ever he had to rid himself of bloody dirt, he would drop it through the hole in the outhouse.

Nivaldo’s eyes were bloodshot, but the trembles were gone. He looked sober and in control. “You want coffee?”

“I want information.”

Nivaldo nodded. “Sit down.”

They both sat at the little table and regarded one another.

“He came about one o’clock, the way he used to. I was still awake, reading the paper. He sat where you’re sitting and said he was hungry, so I opened a bottle of brandy for him and told him I’d warm up the stew. I knew he was here to kill me.” Nivaldo spoke softly and bleakly.

“I was afraid to use a knife on him, afraid to get in that close. I’m old and sick, and he was so much stronger than I am now. But I’m still strong enough to use the iron bar, and I went straight to it. I came up behind him just as he was taking a drink, and I swung it as hard as I could. I knew he wouldn’t give me a second chance.

“Then I sat at this table and finished the bottle of brandy, and I was drunk and didn’t know what to do, until I knew I had to go for you. I’m glad I finished him.”

“What good did it do? Some other killer will come for us and do the job right,”

Josep said with bitterness.

Nivaldo shook his head. “No, nobody else is going to come. If he had brought other people into it, sent them to kill us, he’d have had to kill
them
. That’s why he came alone. We were the last two men who could cause him trouble. He came to Santa Eulália to rid himself of you, but he understood I’d connect him to your death, and I knew just enough about him so he’d feel better if I was gone too.”

Nivaldo sighed. “Actually, I don’t know
that
much about him. When I met him, he said he was a captain, wounded in ’69 while fighting under Valeriano Weyler against the Creoles in Cuba. Once when we got drunk together, he told me General Weyler looked after his army career now and then, because both of them had attended the Military School at Toledo. He definitely had been to Cuba; he knew a lot about the island. When he heard I came from Cuba, we got to talking politics. We ended up talking quite a bit.”

“Was Peña his real name?”

Nivaldo shrugged.

“How did you two get together?”

“At a meeting.”

“What kind of a meeting?”

“Carlist meeting.”

“So he
was
a Carlist.”

Nivaldo rubbed his face. “Well, a lot of Carlist soldiers and officers were given amnesty and taken into the government army after the first two civil wars. Some deserted and rejoined the Carlist forces; others stayed with the national army and worked for the Carlists from the inside. A few became political converts and spied on their old comrades for the government. At the time, I accepted Peña as a Carlist. Now…now, I don’t know where he stood. I just know he came to the Carlist meetings. He was the one who gave us the information that for the third rebellion the Carlist commanders were going to put together a real army in the Basque country, and he let me know he was looking for likely young Catalan men to turn into soldiers to wear the red beret.”

“Did you know his plans for the hunting group?”

Nivaldo hesitated. “Not exactly. I’m just a country grocer, somebody who did things when he told me to do them, but I knew he was training you for something special. When I read in the newspapers about General Prim’s assassination and the group that had stopped his carriage, I got chills. The timing was just right. I was certain our Santa Eulália boys were involved.”

Josep looked at him. “Manel, Guillem, Jordi, Esteve, Enric, Xavier. All of them, dead.”

He nodded. “Sad. But they went to be soldiers, and soldiers die. In my time, I’ve known a lot of dead soldiers.”

“They didn’t die as soldiers…You just served us up to Peña, worthless meat. Why didn’t you bring us into it, give us a choice?”

“Think about it, Josep. Some of you might have gone along, but maybe none of you. You were just clumsy young bulls, not a political thought among you.”

“You believed I was dead too. How did that make you feel?”

“Heart-broken, you fool! But tremendously proud. Prim was so bad for the country. All right, he got rid of that royal bitch Isabella, a disgraceful queen, but he invited the Italian Amadeus to take over the throne. To think that you and I changed history and helped to get rid of Prim made me feel tremendously proud. Patriotic.” The one good eye fixed him like a beam. “I gave Spain the person I loved most in the world, don’t you know that?”

Josep was chilled and nauseated. “Jesús, I wasn’t yours to give. You’re not my father!”

“I was more father to you and Donat than Marcel ever was, and you know that’s true.”

He felt it was possible that he would begin to weep. “How did you get involved in something like this? You’re not even Spanish, not even Catalan.”

“Is that how you talk to me? I’ve been Spanish and Catalan twice as long as you have, you ignorant bastard!”

Suddenly Josep didn’t feel like weeping. He met the fury in the single good eye.

“You can go to hell, Nivaldo,” he said.

For three days he couldn’t bring himself to enter the cellar. Then it was time to check the wine casks to see if they needed to be topped off, and he wasn’t going to do anything to endanger the wine, so he went into the cellar and took care of his business. There was just the neatly made wall of stone where the enclosed space had been. On the other side of the wall—on the other side of three of the walls in that cellar—there was the
vast, deep solidity of the hill, the earth. He told himself that the earth contained all kinds of mysteries that it was fruitless to dwell on, natural and man-made.

He had a need to finish the work on the cellar. He had used up all all the stones he had saved during the excavation, so he took Quim’s wheelbarrow to the river and collected a load of nice stones. It took him less than half a day to complete the small section of wall that had remained uncovered.

Then he just stood there and examined the place—the ceiling and most of one wall of rock, as nature had made it and he had found it; the other walls that he had fashioned, stone by stone; and his wine barrels in a neat line on the dirt floor. He felt shameless satisfaction and also relief, knowing that it would never again be difficult for him to work there.

In a way, he thought, it was very similar to being able to eat the cherries that grew in the cemetery behind the church.

55

The Joining

It rained very early and with just the right intensity that spring, and by May the air had softened so that it seemed to kiss his cheek, fresh but warm, as he left the house each morning and entered the green rows. A few days before the end of the month the real heat arrived. On the first Friday evening in June, Marimar told him to be careful not to eat from a pot, because everyone knew that eating from a pot would bring rain.

The next morning, the air was warm even while it was still dark, and Josep made his way down the lane and sat in the river and scrubbed himself clean. After he soaped his scalp he held his nose and lay back in the running stream with his eyes open, seeing the hopeful, glittery light of the rising sun beyond the watery bubbles. The river ran over his face as if it were washing away his old life.

Back in the house he dressed in his church trousers, blackened boots, and a new dress shirt, and despite the heat he put on the wide light-blue tie and the dark-blue jacket Marimar had bought for him.

Francesc came a bit early, jumping with excitement, and he held Josep’s hand as they walked down the lane, across the placa, and into the church, where they waited restlessly until Briel Taulé drove up with Josep’s mule-drawn cart, carrying Marimar.

She had no dressmaking skills, but she had paid Beatriu Corberó, Briel’s aunt, who was a seamstress, to make her a dark-blue dress that almost matched the color of Josep’s jacket—blue was a color that would bring them luck, Maria del Mar thought. It was a sensible purchase she could wear for a long time on special occasions, a modest dress, high-necked and with plain, easy-fitting sleeves that widened at the wrists. A
double track of small black buttons ran down the front of the shirtwaist, pushed forward by the ampleness of her breasts, and though she had laughed away Beatriu’s suggestion that the costume should include a bustle, the skirt, narrowing from the waist to the knees, showed the natural beauty of her flanks before widening to its full length. On her head she wore a black straw bonnet with a tiny red cockade, and she carried a small bouquet of the white vineyard roses that Josep and Francesc had gathered the day before. Josep, who had never seen her dressed in any but common work clothes, was struck almost dumb by the sight.