The Winemaker (6 page)

Josep was fed up. He wanted only to have them out of his sight, and he agreed that he would come to see them at the end of the week.

When they were gone, he continued to sit at the table in the silent casa, as if stunned.

Finally he got up and went outside and began to walk the vineyard.

It was as if suddenly he had been transformed into the eldest son. He knew he should feel excitement and joy, but instead he was made leaden by doubt.

He walked up and down the plantings of vines, studying them. The rows were not as carefully spaced as the immaculate rows at the Mendes vineyard, and they were curved and contorted like snakes instead of bring reasonably straight. They had been planted carelessly, a jumble of varieties—his eyes picked out small and large groups of Garnacha, Samso, and Ull de Llebre, all mixed in among one another. Generations of his forebears had made wine from them, to be turned into a raw, indifferent vinegar. His ancestors hadn’t cared about varieties, so long as they grew black grapes that gave sufficient juice.

That’s how they had survived. He should be able to survive in the same way, he told himself. But he was troubled; it seemed to him that his change of fortune had happened too easily. Would he be able to meet the challenges of this responsibility?

He wasn’t supporting a family, he told himself, and he had few personal needs save for the simplest of foods. But there would be expenses for the vineyard. He wondered if he could afford to buy a mule. Padre had sold his mule when his two sons became old enough to do a man’s work. With three men in the vineyard, they could handle the work without having to fuss with the care of an animal.

But now he had only his own labor, and a mule would be a godsend.

Over the years, all of the easily useable land had been planted with vines, but as he walked, he saw the last of the late afternoon sun still striking the top of the hill that composed the rear border of the property. Only half of the slope was planted with vines;
the steepness was very close to the angle Leon Mendes had told him was more than forty-five degrees. That was too steep to work with a mule, but Josep had spent many hours planting and tending vines in France, working with hand tools on similarly steep hills.

Most of the older vines were Ull de Llebre. But one section of the hill was planted with Garnacha, and he climbed to where the vines were beautiful and aged, perhaps a hundred years old, with gnarled lower portions as thick as his thighs. There were a handful of hard raisins clinging to the dried tendrils, and when he picked and ate them, he found them still full of lingering flavor.

He went higher, several times going down on one knee as his feet failed to gain sufficient purchase on the roughness of the hill, here and there pausing to pull gorse and weeds. A lot of vines could be planted here! He could considerably increase the production of grapes.

He realized that perhaps he had learned some things that his father hadn’t known. And he was willing to work like a farm animal, and to experiment in ways his father wouldn’t have tried.

That night he would begin to sleep in his father’s bed.

He understood that what had occurred was miraculous, as important to him as the day the king and General Pedro Pablo de Aranda had given the land to Sergeant Jose Alvarez. In that moment all doubt left him, and he was flooded with the happiness that had been eluding him. Filled with thanksgiving, he sat on the warmed earth of the slope and watched as the sun smeared the horizon with redness before disappearing between two hills. In a short time, dusk settled on the small, vine-filled valley of Santa Eulália, and night began to fall on his land.

6

A Trip to Barcelona

On Saturday morning Josep hoed and dug for two hours, breaking the ground along a poor row where very old Ull de Llebre vines were scraggly and the hardpan earth chipped like rock. But he stopped working while the day was still early, not knowing how long it would take him to reach the textile mill where Donat worked. He made his way to the Barcelona road; the long walk from France was still fresh in his memory, and he had no desire to go to the city on foot. Instead he stood and waited for a likely vehicle, allowing several private coaches to pass; then, sighting a large wagon laden with new barrels and pulled by four huge draft horses, he held up his hand and pointed down the road.

The driver, a red-cheeked man built as generously as his horses, pulled on the reins long enough for him to clamber aboard and affably wished him a fine morning. It was a fortunate ride. The horses clopped briskly, and the driver was an even-tempered soul content to spend the time of day in lazy conversation that shortened the trip. He said he was Emilio Rivera, whose cooperage was in Sitges.

“Fine barrels,” Josep said, glancing at the load behind him. “Bound for winemakers?”

Rivera smiled. “No.” He did not sell to winemakers, he said, though he supplied barrels to the vinegar trade. “These are slated for fishfolk on the Barcelona waterfront. They fill my barrels with hake, bream, tuna, herrings…sometimes sardines or anchovies. Not very often with eels, for mostly they sell their entire catch of eels fresh. I do like young eels.”

Neither of the men mentioned the civil war; it was impossible to tell whether a stranger was a Carlist conservative or a government-supporting liberal. When Josep admired the horses, the conversation turned to draft animals.

“I’ll be looking to buy a strong young mule soon, I think,” Josep said.

“Then you must come to the horse fair in Castelldefels, which will be held in only four weeks. My cousin Eusebio Serrat is a buyer of horses, mules, and such. For a small fee he will help you select the best offered there,” the cooper said, and Josep nodded thoughtfully, tucking away the name in his head.

Rivera’s horses moved well. It was not long after midday when they reached the place where the textile factory was located, just outside the walls of Barcelona; but, since Josep had arranged to meet Donat at the mill at five o’clock, he rode beyond the mill village with Senyor Rivera. As he jumped from the cooper’s wagon at the Placa de la Seu, the bells in the Cathedral tower were sounding the news that it was two o’clock.

He strolled through the basilica and vaulted galleries, and ate his bread and cheese on a bench in the cloisters, throwing a crust to a gaggle of geese grazing beneath the medlars, magnolias, and palm trees of the Cathedral garden. Then he sat

outside on the stone steps, enjoying the thin sun that warmed the cool air of early spring.

He knew he was a short walk from the neighborhood where, according to Nivaldo, Teresa’s husband had a shoe repair shop.

He was nervous about the possibility of meeting her in the street. What could he say to her?

But she did not appear. He sat and watched the people entering and leaving the Cathedral—priests, members of the upper classes in fine clothes, nuns in several different
habits, working people with worn faces, children with dirty feet. The shadows were lengthening as he left the Cathedral and made his way through narrow streets and courtyards.

He heard the mill before it came into his sight. At first the roar was like a distant surf that filled his ears with dull and muffled sound and left him uneasy and strangely apprehensive.

Donat embraced him, happy and eager to show Josep where he worked. “Come,” he said. The mill was a large presence of flat red brick. In the entryway the roar was more insistant. A man in a finely-cut black jacket and gray waistcoat looked at Donat. “You! There is a bale of spoiled wool near the carders. It is rotten and cannot be used. You will dispose of it, please.”

Josep knew his brother had been working since four a.m., but Donat nodded. “Yes, Senyor Serna, I will attend to it. Senyor, may I present my brother, Josep Alvarez? I have finished my shift and am about to show him our mill.”

“Yes, yes, show it to him, but then dispose of the bad wool…Is your brother seeking employment then?”

“No, senyor,” Josep said, and the man turned away dismissively.

Donat paused at a crate filled with raw wool and showed Josep how to take some of the material and stuff it into his ears. “To protect against the noise.”

Despite the ear plugs, sound burst over them as they went through a set of doors. They entered a balcony overlooking the vast concrete floor on which limitless rows of machines raised a clacking pandemonium that pounded against Josep’s skin and filled the hollows within his body. Donat tapped his arm to gain his attention.

“Spinners…and…looms,” he mouthed silently. “And…other…things…”

“How…many?”

“Three…hundred!”

He led Josep and they swam through the sea of sound. Donat’s gestures indicated how draymen poured coal directly from delivery wagons into a chute that dropped it close to two boilers into which four half-naked stokers shoveled fuel without pause, creating steam that ran the great engine powering the looms. Down a brick corridor was a room where the raw wool was taken from bales and sorted for quality and staple length—Donat signified that the longer lengths were better—before being fed onto mechanized tables that shook the wool to allow dirt to sift through a screen onto a container below. Scouring machines washed the fleece and shrank it, and carding machines straightened the fibers and prepared them for spinning. In the carding room, Donat smiled at a friend and touched his arm.

“My…brother.”

His co-worker smiled at Josep and took his hand. Then the man touched his own face and turned away. It was a workers’ signal, Josep would learn, indicating that a boss was watching. He could see the overseer—seated behind a table on a small raised platform in the center of the room—looking sharply at them. Next to the overseer a large sign proclaimed

WORK IN SILENCE!

SPEAKING DOES NOT ALLOW YOU TO DO PERFECT WORK!

Donat quickly led him from the room. They followed the path of the wool through the many processes that led to the spinning of the yarn and thread and the weaving and
dyeing of the cloth. Josep was dizzied by the noise and the combined stinks of raw wool, machine oil, coal lamps, and the sweat of a thousand active workers. By the time Donat proudly instructed him to stroke the finished rolls of richly colored fabric, Josep was trembling, and eager to do or say anything that would allow him to get away from the ceaseless, conglomerate screaming of the machines.

He helped Donat dispose of the rotting bale of wool in a dump behind the factory. The sound of the machines followed, but he was grateful to be away from them.

“Can I have a bag of this stuff? I believe I can use it.”

Donat laughed. “Why not? This stinking mess is no good to us. You can have as much as you can bear away.” He filled a cloth sack with the wool and smiled indulgently when his strange brother carried it as they walked from the dump.

Donat and Rosa lived in the mill village, in a tiny “cheap house,” so called because workers rented them from the company inexpensively. His was one in many rows of identical houses. Each house had two miniscule rooms—a bedroom and a combination kitchen and sitting room—and shared an outhouse with a neighbor. Rosa greeted Josep warmly and at once produced the two copies of the sales agreement. “My cousin Carles the lawyer approves the changes,” she said, and watched narrowly as her husband signed both papers. When Josep accepted one of the papers and handed Rosa the notes that were his first payment for the land, she and Donat beamed.

“We will celebrate,” Donat declared, and hurried away to buy the ingredients of a feast. While he was gone, Rosa left Josep alone in the house but returned very quickly, accompanied by a buxom young woman: “My friend Ana Zulema, from Andalucia.”
Both women had clearly prepared for the occasion and wore almost identical dark skirts and starched white blouses.

Donat returned very quickly with food and drink. “I went to the company store. We also have a company church and a company priest. And a company school for small children. You see, all that we need is right here. We never have to leave.” He laid out spiced meat, salads, bacallá, breads, olives; Josep saw that he must have spent most of the first payment on food. “I bought brandy, and vinegar made by the people that used to buy from Padre. Maybe this very bottle of vinegar was made from Padre’s grapes!”

Donat drank deeply of the brandy. Even when he was at home, he couldn’t seem to stop talking about his work. “It’s a new world here. The workers in this mill, they are from all over Spain. Many came from the south, because there are no jobs there. Others had their old lives torn up in the war craziness—houses ruined by the Carlists, crops burned in the fields, food stolen by soldiers, children starving.

“There is a new start here, such a fine future for them and for me, with the machines! Are not the machines wonderful?”

“They are,” Josep said, but hesitantly, because the machines intimidated him.

“I shall be an apprentice only until I’ve been with the mill for two years, and then I’ll be a weaver.” Life wasn’t easy for mill workers, Donat admitted. “The rules are hard. One has to be discreet about spending time in the outhouse when that is necessary. There is no meal break, so I bring a piece of cheese or a little meat in my pocket and eat it while working.” The mill ran twenty-four hours a day, two long shifts, he said. “It stops only on Sundays, when the machinery is oiled and repaired. That’s the work I wish to do, some day.”