The Catalans: A Novel (24 page)

“You aren’t used to it.”

“You might have hurt yourself.”

“It’s all a question of habitude.”

“Fortunately it was not a big semal.”

He said, “Oh well, it’s done,” and sat down on an upturned tub. After a moment the worst had passed and he lit a cigarette. It would be ostentatious to talk casually now, he thought. But as casually as his shaking voice could speak he said, “The Carignan is almost finished now.” And “Have you tried the degree yet? It should make a good fifteen.”

He said that he could take up an empty tub, but they cried out that they would do it. They explained why they had been kept: the headband of the harness they wore for carrying the semals upon their backs (the carrying on one shoulder being too heroic for the whole long day) had broken at the rivets. They would carry up the semals, they said, and they piled three into one and started up the hill. He plunged his head into the cistern, and then with some obstinacy he picked up an empty tub—though the smallest he could find—and followed after.

He could carry it now slung in front of him, and he could put it down whenever he chose. He often put it down. And on the way he found his beret: it had slipped out, then. It had gone at that first violent hitch.

Halfway up he sat down and rested: he felt as if he had just got up from four days’ fever; the trembling went on and on. When he reached the top he was glad they were all working again, for he felt the need of silence: yet one thing he heard—it was Madeleine’s lower neighbor muttering to her “He brought up another semal.” That pleased him, but he did not look.

He set to mechanically, going along much bent: he could still feel that glorious relief from the weight: but Lord, it had drained him. Snip snip, the cutters all through the rows, and the voices ordinary now; but he still felt apart, and battered. He came to a vine already stripped, and then another: almost every other vine was done before him. Even so, he could only just keep up: they were working fast to finish the plot, and the voices were low and rarer now. Then he caught sight of Madeleine ahead of him, crossing into his row to clear him a vine. How kind; how very kind: and when she saw him looking she sent back such a pleasant, friendly smile.

T
HE HUGE MIDDAY MEAL
was over, had been over an hour and more, and now the languor of gorged bodies was passing. They were working a little faster again, high up on the side of the hill, so high that they could see the whole of the casot’s roof and over it to the flat place where the cart came up to take the grapes away.

Dinner had been a repetition of breakfast, though on a larger scale with rabbit stewed in wine and an added dish of cakes. One of the little boys, overexcited with the pouring of the wine skin—that brilliant jet of wine that each in turn directed to his open mouth—lay dead asleep behind a bush, where they had left him, speechless, in the shade.

Alain had drunk his full two liters, strong wine, their own, the very best, but he had not eaten much. It had made his head spin a little, but wine in the sun could never do him harm, and now he was feeling wonderfully refreshed.

As the torpor wore off hands that had been creeping began to fly again; the sound of the secateurs grew more continuous, and the slow hum of the voices rose to the higher screeching normal pitch. Xavier was expected in the afternoon, and the poorest cousin claimed to have seen him already, talking to the Gaudérichs in their vineyard a short way up the valley. Whether it was in expectation of his arrival or whether it was the stimulus of lunch digested, En Laurens and Pau went up and down the hill like men possessed of seven’s strength: the whole year’s wine was gathering, grape by grape, basket to semal, semal to the cart, and so down to the courtyard where they would tread it in the open troughs that night.

The end was in sight: there was a triangular piece cut by the path, then a rough square that ended at the edge of the shriveled maquis: when they reached the top of that it would be the end.

“There will be thirty-four semals this year,” said Alain.

“There were thirty-six in nineteen twenty-three,” said the poorest cousin, who disliked him.

“He won’t be here before the end,” said Côme.

“Still, it is a wonderful year,” said Alain.

“Lording it about . .
. patronizing . . . ,” said Côme in a low and discontented voice.

“Nineteen twenty-three was better.”

They had reached the end of the row and they were spreading up the hill to start their backward sweep. Alain had to maneuver fast to stay next to Madeleine.

Now bend again and cut, cut, cut. A new back would be a fine day’s purchase. But still the vendange was a wonderful break to the ancient world: the work was the same, so were the tools; the ground did not change, nor did the vines; so then the beliefs, the customs, and the frame of mind remained unaltered. Up here he could more than half believe that the ritual grape crushed on the last vine’s foot assured the next year’s harvest. Without any foolish mysticism of the blood he could feel a hundred peasant forebears on the loose and stony ground. That was not childishness, he thought. He straightened for a moment to ease his back and suddenly, because of the white sail on it, he saw the great sea that had been spread out before him, unseen, since the dawn. The sea and the vast sweep of coast, where the brown mountains round out in arms and promontories: there was Cap Creus; that was Spain. And the brilliant ship, that was the first of the Spanish schooners, up from the Balearics, shaping her straight path for Port-Vendres.

Bend again, with the sea shut out. These were new vines, with little on them. Maccabeu grapes.

“There he is,” said the poorest cousin, pointing down the hill: but Alain did not attend, for he had seen before him in the next row to his a whole vine with every grape untouched. It was Madeleine who had done that. Setting his lips he whistled loud, the whistle that he had not made since he was nineteen. They stopped and stared; she stopped and turned. With a quick pace he was up to her. He knocked her to the ground. She fell on her knees, and crouching over her he gripped her hair and ears, pressed his teeth hard against her forehead, and in the surrounding cries and laughter he crowed three times, loud like a cock.

CHAPTER NINE

T
HE FEAST OF
S
AINT
-F
ÉLIU
came always after the vendanges: it was not the feast of the saint, and indeed the saint himself had often attended it in his earlier, unhallowed days; it was older than the saint by far, and older than his religion. Yet there was an odd mixture of customs in it, some obviously of great antiquity and some that were apparently far more recent. For example, the inhabitants of Saint-Féliu wore masks, as though it were the Carnival, and the more cheerful souls would change their dress, disguise themselves as pigs, apes, and bears—most often bears.

“The masks are simply carried on from Mardi Gras,” said Alain, “and that is a Christian festival, if ever there was one.”

“You have an odd idea of Christianity,” said Xavier.

They were sitting on the Place, at the green tables of the Café de Gênes, under the plane trees: the leaves were worn and faded now, yellowing leaves, and their edges were torn by the tramontane. Yet still the weather held: the perfect autumn days followed week after week, and although by now even the deepest of the cobbles in the streets were clean from the mauve stain of the washed-out vats and treading tubs, although the strong, heady smell of the new wine was gone and the very last vines were stripped naked, yet still the sun blazed down, day after day from an unclouded sky swept by the autumn tramontane. Even now, in the twilight of the day, the heat lingered, and Alain’s pig-faced mask lay on the table in front of him while he mopped himself with his handkerchief: it was stuffy inside the mask. Xavier, indifferent to the heat, still had his on, a human visage, pink and white, with a simpering pair of scarlet, pursed-up lips. Through the holes his cold eyes looked strangely alive: he was watching the preparations for the dance.

He did not seem at all inclined to talk, but Alain was in a bubbling flow of spirits, a most unwonted merriment and restless energy, and he persisted in his speculation.

“One might say that it is fundamentally the Bacchanalia, don’t you think? The Bacchanalia with a whole mass of incongruous accretions.”

“One might, if one were brutally uninformed. Don’t you know that the Bacchanalia were held at intervals of three full years? What do you think trieterica sacra means?” The utter stillness of his mask and the insipid painted smirk on it made the strongest contrast with the deliberate harshness of his words.

“I hate uninformed speculation,” he added, after a pause.

Alain put on his mask again. “Well,” he said in a conciliating tone, “I suppose one should leave these things to the anthropologists. But it is interesting, all the same .
. . And the bears. There is the bear-dance at Amélie (it is Amélie, isn’t it?)—most probably they are connected. I should very much like to see a bear. They say there are a few in Andorra still.”

Xavier made no reply.

Alain continued, “But what I am most eager to see is this new accretion. When is it to begin?”

“The sardana, you mean? Soon.”

“I wish you would describe the orchestra—there’s Côme,” he said, pointing suddenly with his pig’s snout into the crowd before them. It was an outrageous travesty, if it was Côme: the figure was dressed as a woman, vast and flowing, as indecent as ingenuity could make it. It minced about, and from the roars of laughter that followed it it must have been uttering obscenity.

“Is it Côme?” asked Xavier.

“Yes, I think it is.” Alain listened to the voice through the gusts of laughter, but the high thin squeaking, the traditional voice of the mask, was so well disguised that he could only tell that it was a man.

“Lewdness. Lewdness,” said Xavier, in a low, angry voice.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Alain, “I think it is rather funny.”

The figure was approaching the tables, swerving erratically. It pounced on the waiter and squeaked, “Will you make me a little baby, Pierre? Just a little one, like Louise’s?”

“Ha ha ha,” went the crowd.

“Don’t be shy, Pierrot: you weren’t shy with Mme. Bompas when her husband was away, you know.”

“Ha ha ha.”

“Or is it that he has a cold? Don’t say that the chicken from Paris has given you a cold, Pierre?”

The young man ran away from them, scarlet, back into the café, holding up his tray to give himself a countenance.

“It’s not Côme,” said Alain, delighted.

“It is not funny, either. But it was probably too witty for Côme: Côme’s highest idea of wit is a chamber-pot. If you must have some kind of a classical parallel, why not pick on the Saturnalia? There was the same gross liberty of speech, I believe.”

“You do not seem to be enjoying yourself much, Xavier.”

“Are you enjoying yourself?” The voice behind the fixed simper was unusually bitter.

“Yes,” said Alain, nodding his grave pig’s face, “I am having a lovely time.” When he had thought for a moment, staring into the crowd that filled the Place, he added, “When you know all the people, and when everybody is having a good time all round you, things do not have to be very witty to make you laugh. Who do you think that bear is?”

It was a fine bear, made of sacking, stuffed with straw: round its middle it had a chain, which it clanked as it danced. But the bear was suffering cruelly from the heat, and when it reached the tables it called for a glass of lemonade.

“He will never get it down without taking his mask off,” said Alain, watching it with intense interest. But the man’s head did not reach the bear’s head, and he drank through a hole in the bear’s chest, deceiving one and all.

“I did not think he could do it,” cried Alain. “It must have been a boy. Or do you think it was old Ramone?”

Xavier did not answer, and Alain, feeling a sudden spurt of anger, said “Oh don’t be so superior, Xavier.” But Xavier did not hear him: he was drumming angrily on the table with his fingers and watching the men who were arranging the lights over the balcony where the band was going to play. There were several men, a whole knot of them clustered round the trailing cables, and they were bawling instructions to one another, pulling in contrary directions, tripping in the fading light, arguing passionately with the bystanders and the people on the balcony.

“They will wreck the whole thing,” said Xavier, springing up. He hurried into the middle of them and Alain could hear his hard voice raised over the general medley of sound, peremptory orders, a sharp and decisive putting-down. In two minutes the string of lights was up and the musicians’ place was lit: But it was very noticeable that the festive temper in the Place had cooled, and where Xavier had been there was silence.

Now there was a fresh disturbance, a swirling of the crowd at the far end of the Place, howling and laughter: the musicians’ car from Perpignan was trying to get in, edging its way among the people, and three bears and an ape were rolling on the ground in front of it, leaping on to its bonnet, mopping and mowing under its very wheels. The ape, in a flying bound, had reached the wicker basket on the roof—the coffin that contained the double-bass—then Xavier was among them. The car’s horn stopped, the excited voices died away, and the musicians went on to their appointed place: among the bobbing heads Alain could see Xavier pointing to his watch, tapping its dial, while the leader of the band made his excuses.