The Winemaker (10 page)

“Yes, senyor,” he said miserably.

11

The Visitors

The next morning Marcel Alvarez and his sons began the harvesting of their vineyard, cutting the plump dark bunches of grapes and filling basket after basket, which they emptied into two good-sized tumbrels. Josep loved the musky, sweet scent and the heft of the juice-filled bunches in his hand. He threw himself into the work, but his exertions didn’t bring him peace of mind.

Jesús. From whom must I steal those chickens, those two fat hens?

It was a terrible question. He could name offhand half a dozen villagers who raised chickens, but they did so because the eggs and meat were precious. They needed the birds to feed their families.

Mid-morning, he was diverted from his worrying when two neatly-dressed Frenchmen came to the vineyard. In courteous, strangely Frenchified Catalan, they introduced themselves as Andre Fontaine and Leon Mendes of Languedoc. Fontaine, tall and very slender, with a carefully tended goatee and a full head of hair like spun grey iron, was the wine buyer for a large vinegar-producing cooperative. His companion, Mendes, was shorter and portly, with a pink balding scalp, a round clean-shaven face, and serious brown eyes warmed by his smile. Since his accented Catalan was better than Fontaine’s, he did most of the talking for the pair.

He was a winemaker himself, he revealed. “My friend, Fontaine, is a bit short of good grapes this year,” Mendes said. “As you may have heard, we had two disastrous hailstorms in Southern France this spring. You did not have the same misfortune, I believe?”

“By the grace of heaven, no,” Marcel said.

“Most of the grapes in my own vineyard were undamaged, and the Mendes vineyard will make a vintage this year as usual. But some of the farmers in the vinegar cooperative have lost a lot of grapes, and Fontaine and I have come to Spain to buy young wine.”

Marcel and his sons continued to work while their visitors stood with them and talked companionably.

Fontaine took a small folding knife from his waistcoat pocket and cut a bunch from an Ull de Llebre vine, and then a Garnacha. He tasted several of the grapes from each bunch, munching judiciously. Then, his lips pursed, he glanced at Mendes and nodded.

Mendes had been watching Josep, noting the swift sure way that he filled his basket with fruit and emptied it, again and again. “Dieu, this boy works like a perpetual motion machine,” he called to Marcel Alvarez. “I would dearly love to have a few workers such as this one!”

Josep heard and drew a deep breath. When Miquel Figueres had been summoned to work on his uncle’s farm in Girona, he had told Josep gratefully that it was a miracle that allowed him to escape the unemployment in Santa Eulália. Could this plump little man in his brown French suit be a similar miracle, a source of a job for Josep?

One of the small wagons was bountifully filled, and Marcel looked to his sons. “Best bring this one to the press,” he called.

The visitors pitched in and helped the Alvarez men push the tumbrel filled with grapes to the small placa.

“The press is used by the community?” Mendes said.

“Yes, we share its use. My father and others built this beautiful large press more than fifty years ago,” Marcel said proudly. “
His
father had built a granite cistern for stomping the grapes. It exists still, behind our shed. I keep supplies in it now. You have your own press in Languedoc?”

“Actually, no. We tread our grapes. Treading produces a softer wine with maximum flavor, because the foot doesn’t break the pips and release bitterness. So long as we have feet we shall use them on our grapes, though it costs. It takes extra hired help and friends to tread the grapes from our eighteen hectares,” Mendes said.

“Easier and cheaper to do it this way. And one is not required to wash his feet,” Marcel said, and the visitors joined in his laughter.

Fontaine lifted one of the bunches. “They still have their stems, monsieur. Would you be willing to remove them if I should request it?” Fontaine asked.

“The stems do not hurt anything,” Marcel said slowly. “After all, senyor, you only want a wine that will become vinegar. Same as us.”

“We make a very special vinegar. Very expensive to buy, actually. To make such a special vinegar, one requires special grapes… If we were to buy from you, I would be prepared to pay for the extra effort of destemming.”

Marcel shrugged and then nodded.

When they reached the press with the tumbrel, the two Frenchmen stared as Josep and Donat began to shovel in bunches of grapes.

Fontaine cleared his throat. “It is not necessary to wash the press first?”

“Oh, it has been washed this morning, of course. Since then, it had received only grapes,” Marcel said.

“But there is something already in it!” Mendes cried.

It was true. A vomitous yellow sludge of broken fruit and stems still lay at the bottom of the press tub.

“Ah, my neighbor, Pau Fortuny, has been here before me and has left me a small gift of white grapes…It is no problem, it all makes juice,” Marcel said.

Fontaine saw that Donat Alvarez had found half a basket of white grapes left behind by the sloppy Pau Fortuny and had added these grapes to the press as well.

He glanced at Mendes. The smaller man understood his look at once and shook his head regretfully.

“Well, my friend, we wish you good fortune,” Mendes said, and Josep saw that the Frenchmen were preparing to leave.

“Senyor,” he blurted.

Mendes turned and looked at him.

“I would like to work for you, senyor, and help you make wine at your vineyard in…in…”

“My vineyard is in the country, near the village of Roquebrun, in Languedoc. But…work for me? Ah, but I am sorry. I fear that would be quite impossible.”

“But, senyor, you said…I heard you say…that you wished you had someone like me to work with your grapes.”

“Well, young man…But that was only a manner of speaking. A way to offer a compliment.”

The Frenchman’s eyes were on Josep’s face, and what he saw there visibly embarrassed him and made him regretful. “You are an excellent worker, young man. But I already have a crew in Languedoc, deserving local people from Roquebrun who have worked for me a long time and are trained in my requirements. You understand?”

“Yes, senyor. Of course. Local people,” Josep said.

He was aware of his father and Donat gazing at him, and he turned to the tumbrel and resumed shoveling grapes into the press.

12

Foraging

During the remainder of the harvest Josep returned to hard, practical thought, uncontaminated by childish hope or dreams of miracles.

Where was he to get two hens?

He told himself that if he must steal, it should be from a wealthy man whose family wouldn’t suffer because of the crime, and he knew of only one rich man who raised chickens.

The alcalde. “Angel Casals,” he said aloud.

His brother looked up.

“What about him?” Donat said.

“Oh…He…rode past on their mule, inspecting the village,” Josep said.

Donat went back to cutting bunches of grapes. “Why do I care?” he said.

It would be dangerous. Angel Casals had a rifle of which he was proud, a long weapon with a mahogany stock that he kept oiled and polished like a gem. While Josep was still a small boy, the alcalde had used the rifle to kill a fox that had been trying to get at his chickens. The children of the village had stroked the corpse; Josep remembered clearly the beauty of the animal, the perfect softness of the lustrous red-brown coat and the silky white fur of the stomach, the yellow eyes fixed in death.

He was certain Angel would fire at a thief just as readily as he had fired at the fox.

The chicken theft would have to occur in the middle of the night, when everyone else in the village was deep in the sleep of honest working people. Josep thought he
would be all right after he had gained concealment in the chicken house. The birds would be accustomed to the alcalde’s sons coming into the henhouse to collect eggs; if he moved slowly and quietly, the chickens shouldn’t make much of a fuss.

It was the time just before entering the henhouse that was the heaviest problem. Angel had a large, black mastiff, vicious and a barker. The safest way to deal with the dog would be to kill him, but Josep knew he could not kill a dog any more than he could slit a man’s throat.

And the dog scared him.

For several days he ate only part of his chorizo when he had his dinner, gathering a modest collection of meat in one of his pockets, but he quickly realized it would not be enough. After the finish of the harvest, when he and Donat had taken the barrel containing the juice from the last batch of grapes and added it to one of the age-blackened fermenting vats in his father’s shed, Josep walked to the grocery and asked Nivaldo if perhaps he had some salchicha so spoiled he would not be able to sell it.

“What do you want with rotten sausage?” Nivaldo said grumpily, and Josep told him it was needed for an exercise in woodcraft dreamed up by the sergeant, which required the baiting of animal traps. The old man took Josep to the storeroom where he kept a variety of salchichas, a whole row of large sausages hung on strings from a beam to cure, some of them whole, some already cut and partially sold off—morcilla made with onion and paprika, lomo with and without red pepper, salchichon, sobresada. Josep pointed to a piece of lomo that looked decidedly green on the cut end, but Nivaldo shook his head. “Are you serious? That is excellent slow-cured pork. Cut off the end and the rest will be beautiful. No, this stuff is all too good to throw away. But you wait here,” he
said, and threaded his way between a mountain of beans in sacks and a box of wrinkled potatoes. Josep heard him grunting behind the bean mountain as he moved bags and boxes, and eventually he returned holding a long piece of…something, mostly covered in a white growth.

“Uh, will…the animals…you know,
want
it?”

Nivaldo closed his eyes. “Will they want it? Blood sausage made with rice? This is too good for them, morcilla that has been forgotten and aged too long. It’s just what you’re looking for, Tigre.”

When Josep was a boy, a cur bit him, a skinny yellow mutt owned by the Figueres family. Whenever he passed their vineyard, the dog leaped out at him, barking madly. Terrified, he tried to intimidate the animal by shouting at it and staring with false menace into the dark little eyes that seemed to him the incarnation of evil, but that only made the dog wilder. As it came at him one day, snarling, he kicked out in his fright and sharp teeth closed on his ankle, drawing blood when he yanked his leg away. For two years, until the dog died, Josep avoided going near the Figueres vineyard.

Nivaldo had counseled him. “One should never gaze into the eyes of another man’s dog’s. A dog sees a stranger’s stare as a challenge, and if he is a fierce dog, he responds by attacking, perhaps even wanting to take your life. One should look at a dog only briefly, glance away without fleeing or showing fear, and speak to the animal softly and soothingly.”

Josep had no idea if Nivaldo’s theories worked, but he considered them as he rubbed the blood sausage as hard as he could with handfuls of grass, removing a lot of the
white bloom. He cut the sausage into small pieces, and that evening as dusk fell on Santa Eulália, he walked to the village placa, past the Casals’ vegetable field. The chicken house was at the far end of the field, the rich soil of which was manured but not ploughed. The dog, attached to the rickety structure by a very long rope, lay dozing in front of the henhouse like a dragon guarding a castell.

The alcalde’s casa was within easy eyesight of the chicken coop, little more than half the length of the field away.

Josep walked aimlessly until the full darkness of night had fallen; then he returned to Angel Casals’s field.

This time, keeping an eye on the lantern light in the window of the house, he walked slowly across the field heading straight for the dog, which soon began to bark. Just before he was close enough to see the animal, the dog came at him, held back only by the limitations of his rope tether. The alcalde, resting from his farming and mayoral duties, should be sound asleep, as should his sons, but Josep knew that if the barking continued, someone would come from the house.