The Winemaker (29 page)

The aboveground housing and the long steel handle came painted a deep blue. Once it was installed, the mechanics demonstrated how the handle had to be raised and lowered several times to raise water into the chamber. The first stroke produced a mechanical sigh, the second an indignant squawk, and finally a smooth-running gush.

Initially, of course, the water was foul. First the councilors took turns purging the well, and then several others pumped. From time to time the alcalde put his hand into the stream from the spout and sniffed it, and each time he frowned.

Finally when he smelled his hand, he turned toward Josep and raised his eyebrows. Eduardo and Josep captured some of the water in their cupped hands and sniffed it.

“Perhaps a little more,” Eduardo said, and Josep took his place at the pump. Presently he picked up a cup, held it under the spout, and brought it to his lips to taste it tentatively. Then he drained the cup of sweet cold water, rinsed it, and held it out to the alcalde, who drank and nodded his head, beaming.

Eduardo had the cup to his lips and was drinking as villagers crowded about them, waiting their turn to get water, and thanking the alcalde.

“I made up my mind this must never happen again. I will always take care of you,” Angel Casals said modestly. “I am so happy to have found a permanent solution to the problem.”

Over the cup’s rim, Eduardo’s eyes met Josep’s. Eduardo’s face remained as bland and serious as ever, but by the time he stopped drinking, his eyes were sharing an enjoyable fellowship with Josep’s.

44

Towers

Eduardo Montroig’s house was on the placa, and each morning as soon as he awoke, he hurried outside to prime the pump. Josep drifted into an easy friendship with him, though they didn’t spend much time together because they both worked hard, long days. Eduardo was not pompous, but his face bore an expression of solemn responsibility that made him a natural leader. He was the cap de colla of the village castellers—the captain and coach of the troupe—and he recruited his fellow councilor into its ranks. Goodwill warming his homely, long-jawed features, he appeared shocked when Josep required more than a single invitation to join.

“But we need you! We need you, Josep.”

Where Josep was needed, it turned out, was in the fourth tier. He remembered from his youth that it had been to the fourth tier that Eusebi Gallego, Teresa’s father, had climbed.

He had doubts, but he went to a practice and found that building a human castell began with ritual.

The members of the troupe wore a uniform—bare feet, baggy white trousers, billowy blouses, headscarves bound tightly to protect the ears. They helped each other into black sashes called faixas. Each sash was long, more than three meters; the helper pulled it straight out, very taut, while the climber held the other end against his body and then whirled like a top, round and round, until he was bound into a tight corset of fabric that gave rigid support to his spine and back and offered a good handhold to other climbers.

Eduardo spent long hours plotting the tower on paper, assigning each position based on the climber’s individual strengths and weaknesses, constantly analyzing and making changes. He insisted on music at all the practices, and the grallas shrilled as he signaled the climbers to start.

Soon he called, “Let’s go, four,” and Josep, Albert Fiore, and Marc Rubió climbed up and over the backs of the first three layers of men.

Josep couldn’t believe it. When he ascended to his place the castell was only half built, yet he felt he was as high as a bird could fly. For a split moment of terror he teetered, but Marc’s strong arm kept him in place, and he regained his balance and his confidence.

Another moment and they held each other tightly while others climbed over them in turn, and Briel Tauré’s feet and weight settled onto Josep’s shoulders.

It was in the fifth layer that the trouble occurred, Josep feeling it first as a ripple from above, then a lurching that threatened to pull his hand away from Marc’s shoulder, and finally a tearing away of the hands that had steadied him. He felt Briel’s toenails rasp his cheek and heard Albert’s gutteral groan, “Merda,” and they all went down together, bodies falling on other bodies.

He lay for a brief unpleasantness with someone’s moist armpit on his face, but everyone quickly disentangled, cursing or laughing, according to their personalities. There were many bruises, but Eduardo soon established that there were no serious injuries.

What a strange pastime, Josep thought. But even as he did so, he recognized a new truth.

He had found something he was going to love to do.

On a warm Sunday morning Donat came to the village, and they sat on the bench near the vines and ate slightly stale bread and hard sausage.

Donat clearly thought that digging a cellar was a form of lunacy, but he was tremendously impressed by the fact that Josep had acquired their neighbor’s land. “Padre would not believe it,” he said.

“Yes…Well, but…I’m not going to make this quarter’s payment to you and Rosa,” Josep said carefully.

Donat looked at him with alarm.

“I am short of cash, but it will be just as we arranged in the contract. When I make the next payment, following the harvest, I’ll also give you this payment as well, plus ten percent.”

“Rosa will be upset,” Donat said nervously.

“You must explain to her that it’s to your advantage to wait for payment, since now you’ll receive the additional penalty.”

Donat became cold and distant. “You don’t understand. You are not married,” he said, and Josep couldn’t argue with him.

“Do you have more sausage?” Donat asked peevishly.

“No, but come and we’ll stop at Nivaldo’s and get you a nice piece of chorizo that you can eat on the way home,” Josep said and patted his brother on the shoulder.

45

Vines

That summer the weather was precisely what Josep would have ordered if it had been possible to do so, days of tolerable heat and cooler nights, and he spent long hours among the vines, wandering along the rows when his work was completed, haunting the old plants whose buds he had limited, inspecting everything as though his eyes could make the grapes grow better at every stage. The grapes on those vines came in very small. As soon as they darkened in color, he began to sample them, savoring flavors unripe but full of promise.

He did very little work in the cellar, intent on other projects. In July he emptied the stone cistern his great-grandfather had used to stomp his grapes, moving the things that had been stored in it—tools ands buckets and bags of lime—to Quim’s house, and then scrubbing out the tank and rinsing it with water hauled from the river and warmed and mixed with sulfur. The cistern still was very serviceable, but the petcock that would allow him to drain the juice of trodden grapes was in bad shape and he saw it would have to be replaced. For several Fridays he attended the market in Sitges, looking for a used spigot, but finally he gave in and bought a new one of shiny brass.

It was mid-August when Emilio and Juan came to the vineyard in the cooperage’s big wagon and Josep worked with them to unload two large vats made of new oak wood that smelled so good he couldn’t believe they were his. They were the only new vats he had ever seen, and set in place next to Quim’s house they looked even better than they smelled. He had paid Emilio for one of them, as they had agreed, and though that had left him with diminished cash and heavier debt, he was so excited that he took Maria del
Mar aside and asked her to do him a favor. She hurried to Angel’s farm and bought eggs, potatoes, and onions, and while the coopers sat with Josep and drank bad wine, she made a fire and cooked a huge tortilla that soon they all shared with great relish.

Josep was grateful to Emilio and Juan and liked their company, but he was impatient for them to leave. When finally they drove their wagon away, he hurried back to the Torras piece and stood before his new tanks for a long time, just looking at them.

With each passing day he was more anxious and uneasy, acutely aware of the risks he had taken. He studied the sky a great deal, waiting for nature to torture him with hail or pounding rain or some other calamity, but rain fell only once, a gentle soaker, and the days continued to be warm and the nights progressively cooler.

Maria del Mar enjoyed the autumn tradition they had established and wished to cut the cards again to see whose crop should be harvested first, but he told her he wanted to take her grapes before his, because the fruit on the old vines wasn’t ripe enough. “We might as well wait until we can move onto my land and do my entire harvest,” he said, and she agreed.

As usual, he enjoyed working with her. She was a ferocious worker with amazing energy, and sometimes he had to struggle to keep up as they moved along the rows, rapidly harvesting grapes.

He found himself enjoying her proximity and comparing her to other women he had known. She was prettier than Teresa and far more interesting. He allowed himself to admit that she was more desirable than Juliana Lozano, or Renata, or Margit Fontaine,
and so much easier to be with than any of those women, when she wasn’t giving him hell about something.

When they finished pressing her grapes, Josep and Maria del Mar moved onto his land and harvested the grapes whose juice would go to the vinegar works, hauling them to the village press in the usual way. Most of that harvesting was done on the Alvarez piece, and he filled his own vats with the juice that would go to the vinegar company. Though many of the old Garnacha and Cariñena vines he had pruned of buds were on his family land, the oldest Ull de Llebre vines were on the Torras piece, and Josep roamed among them, picking a grape here and there and chewing judiciously.

“They are ripe,” Maria del Mar told him.

But he shook his head.

“Not ripe enough,” he said.

The next day, his verdict was the same.

“You’re waiting too long. They will be overripe, Josep,” Maria del Mar said.

“Not yet,” he told her firmly.

Maria del Mar looked up at the sky. It was cloudless and blue, but they both knew how the weather could change, bringing a terrible rainstorm or a destroying wind. “It is as if you are daring God,” she said in frustration.

He didn’t know how to reply. Perhaps she was right, he thought, but “I think God will understand,” he said.

Early the next day when he put an Ull de Llebre in his mouth and his teeth broke the thick skin, the juice in the single small grape flooded his mouth with flavor, and he nodded.

“Now we pick,” he said.

He and Maria del Mar and Briel Taulé began to take the grapes in the first grey light, cutting bunches and spreading each basketful on a table in the shade and picking the individual berries, slow, fussy work. If the growth had been greener Josep would have asked them to destem everything, but the vines were so ripe he told them a bit of stem now and then would be a good thing. They carefully culled out any spoiled grape or bit of trash before pouring the beautiful dark treasure gently into the stone cistern.

They picked part of the crop in the coolness of early morning, and began to pick the rest in the late afternoon, working hard and fast throughout the early evening in order to beat the coming darkness. When all light failed just before ten o’clock Josep placed lanterns and torches around the stone cistern and Maria del Mar carried her sleeping son to a blanket Josep spread where she could see him.

They sat on the rim of the cistern and scrubbed their feet and legs and then they ventured into the tank. Josep had spent most of his life on this vineyard yet had never trod grapes until he had found his way to France. Now the wet feeling of the grapes popping under his naked feet was deliciously familiar, and he smiled to see the expression on Maria del Mar’s face.

“What should we do?” Briel asked.

“Just walk,” Josep said.

For an hour it was pleasant to stride in the tank in the cool air, back and forth, six paces the long way. The two men were shirtless, their trouser legs rolled high, and Maria del Mar’s hem was pinned to her waist. After a time, it grew more difficult, their legs tiring, each step marked by the sucking sound of the sweet-smelling must that seemed to release their feet almost reluctantly.