The Winemaker (25 page)

“Still young. Strong. Can
bear
children, you understand! Can help a man in his work. A very good worker, Juliana…I have told her about you.”

Josep looked at him dumbly.

“So. Would you like to see her?”

“…Well. Why not?”

“Good. She is a waiter in a café, very near here. I will buy you a wine,” Juan said grandly.

Josep followed him nervously.

The café was a workingman’s place and crowded. Juan led him to a scarred table and in a moment touched his hand.

“Psst.”

Josep registered that she was older than he was, with a voluptuous body that had begun to sag, and a pleasant, good-humoured face. He watched her exchanging badinage with four men at a nearby table. She had a high, coarse laugh.

As she turned toward them, Josep felt a rising panic.

He tried to tell himself that this was an opportunity. That he had wanted to meet new women.

She greeted Juan warmly with two kisses, calling him uncle. He performed the introduction gruffly: “Juliana Lozano. Josep Alvarez.”

She smiled, made a little dip of a bow. When they ordered wine, she left at once and brought it. “You like white bean soup?” she asked Josep.

He nodded, though he wasn’t hungry. But she hadn’t been talking about the café menu. “Tomorrow night. I give you white bean soup, yes?” She grinned at him, warm and easy, and he grinned back.

“Yes.”

“Good. The house across the street, second floor,” she said. “The middle door.”

Clouds hid the moon the following evening. The street was poorly lighted by a flickering streetlamp, and the stairway of her house proved to be even darker. Carrying a long pa as his share of the dinner, he went up the stairs in semi-darkness to a narrow corridor and tapped at the middle door.

Juliana welcomed him with good cheer, accepted the bread, broke it with a couple of twists, and placed it on the table.

He was seated without ceremony and served the spicy bean soup at once, which both of them ate with enthusiasm. Josep complimented her on her cooking, and she smiled. “I brought it home from the café,” she said, and they both laughed. They talked sparingly of her uncle Juan, Josep relating to her the kindnesses Juan had shown to him at the cooperage.

Presently, even before he moved to kiss her, Juliana led him to the bed as matter-of-factly as she had served him the soup.

Before midnight he was making his way home again, his body lighter and released but his mind curiously burdened. It had been, he thought, rather like eating a piece of fruit that had proved to be edible and without fault but was undeniably less than sweet, and he rode hunched and brooding as he and Hinny made their way over the road leading back into the countryside.

38

Harvesting

Josep understood the puzzlement of some of the villagers. He had left Santa Eulália a jobless boy. When he returned, he had gained control of his father’s vineyard, and now he had the Torras property as well.

“Are you able to work both pieces of land by yourself?” Maria del Mar asked him doubtfully.

He had given it thought. “If you and I continue to work together to harvest our crops, as we did before, I’ll hire somebody to pick the grapes from Quim’s vines. One picker should be enough, since the Torras crop will be much smaller than either of ours,” he said, and she agreed.

He had his choice of every village youth who wasn’t a first son, and he chose Gabriel Taulé, a quiet, steady boy of seventeen years, who had three older brothers. Known to everyone as Briel, the youth looked stunned when Josep approached him with the offer of work, and he accepted eagerly.

Josep scrubbed his wine vats and then turned to the tanks located under a roof extension at the side of Quim’s casa. What he saw when he began to clean them disturbed him, for two of the containers had areas that reminded him unpleasantly of the rotted section he had been forced to have Emilio Rivera replace on his own vat. But he told himself that it was no use worrying about problems if one was not certain they existed, and he washed the vats with water and a sulfur solution and prepared them to accept the juice of the grapes.

As the summer turned into the autumn, and the bunches of grapes on the vines became heavy and purple-black, Josep walked among the rows every day, sampling and tasting—now the warm spiciness of a small grape from an old Garnacha vine; now the fruity, complex promise of an Ull de Llebre; now the acid tartness of one of the Sumolls.

He and Maria del Mar agreed one morning that the grapes had reached the time of perfect ripeness, and he summoned Briel Tauré and gave him Hinny and the tumbrel to use on the Torras piece.

He and Maria del Mar and Quim had worked well together, but Josep found that it was even better to work alone with her, because they thought alike about the tasks and harvested well in tandem, talking rarely. He had hitched her mule to his wagon. The only sound was the snick! snick! snick! of their sharp knives as they severed bunches from the vines and dropped them into their baskets. They toiled under a radiant sun, clothing soon plastering against their bodies and showing dark, intimate patches. Fransesc hovered, fetching an occasional cup of water for one of them from the clay cántir kept in the shade under the wagon, limping after the wagon to the press, or perching on the back of the mule.

Sometimes Briel, alone and lost in the reverie of work, would allow himself a burst of song in a loud off-key chant, more a yawping and shouting than a singing, and at first when this sound reached them, Josep and Maria del Mar exchanged wry smiles. Having the large wagon was a luxury; even though Maria del Mar and Josep each cut faster than Briel, the youth filled the small tumbrel quickly. Each time he did so he shouted, and Josep was forced to drop his knife and hasten to help him muscle the fruit-filled tumbrel to the press.

Josep was aware that during his frequent trips to the press with grapes from the Torras piece, Maria del Mar continued to work in her own vineyard alone, a contribution of her time and energy that was over and above the terms of their working agreement. He felt he must make it up to her, and at the end of the day, when he had sent Briel home and Maria del Mar had unhitched the mule and left to make her son his supper, Josep continued to work stolidly by himself in her vineyard.

An hour later, when she came out of her house to throw the gathered crumbs from her table to the birds, she saw Josep still bent over a vine and wielding his knife.

She walked to him. “What are you doing?”

“My share of the work.”

When he looked at her, he saw that she was stiff with anger.

“You insult me.”

“How do I do that?”

“When I needed help to get a fair price for my work, you provided it. You said then that you did what any man would have done, your exact words. But you don’t allow yourself to accept even the slightest help from a woman.”

“No, it’s not that way.”

“It is exactly that way. You disrespect me in a way you wouldn’t do to a man,” she said. “I want you out of my vineyard until tomorrow.”

Josep felt his own anger. Damn the female, he thought, she was twisting things, confusing him, as usual.

He was disgusted, but he was tired and dirty and had no heart for stupid quarrels, and he cursed silently, flipped his basket into the wagon, and went home.

The next morning for a brief time things were awkward between them, but the rhythms of the shared work soon drove away the irritated words they had exchanged the evening before. Josep continued to break off and leave whenever Briel signaled that he needed help, but he and Maria del Mar functioned together very well, and he was pleased with their harvest of her grapes.

It was midmorning when Briel made his way to Teresa’s vineyard, and Josep knew at once from his face that something was wrong.

“What?”

“It is the vat, senyor,” Briel said

When Josep saw the tank, his heart sank. It wasn’t gushing, but a steady ooze of grape juice made wet tracks down the exterior of the container. There were six vats in a line on the shady side of Quim’s house, and he studied them and then pointed to the one that looked least suspicious, though there was little to differentiate them. “Use that one,” he said.

Late in the afternoon, while he was working, he spotted Clemente Ramirez driving his great wagon down the lane to the river to rinse out his barrels.

“Hola, Clemente!” Josep called.

He raced to intercept the wagon and lead Clemente to inspect the offending vats.

Ramirez examined the wooden tanks carefully and then shook his head. “These two are gone.” He pointed. “Repairing them would be to throw good money after bad. This other vat Quim Torras can use for a few more years yet, I think.

“I can come tomorrow and take the juice from here early, and they’ll ferment it at the vinegar plant. Of course, that means I must pay Quim a bit less for it, but…” He shrugged.

“Quim is gone.”

Clemente was visibly impressed to learn that Josep now owned the Torras land as well as the Alvarez vineyard. “Jesucristo, I must treat you well, for at this rate you will end up a great landowning lord and our governor.”

Josep did not feel like a lord and a governor as he returned to work. He had known that it would take several seasons before he could build up his yield from the Torras piece. Now his return from this year’s harvest would be even less than he had anticipated, and Clemente’s assessment of the vats was the worst possible news.

New vats were very expensive.

He had no money for new vats.

He cursed the day when he had listened to Quim’s pleas and agreed to buy his vineyard. He was a fool to have taken pity on a neighbor who was a raddled old drunkard and a failed and miserable farmer, he told himself bitterly, and now he was afraid that before he had truly begun as a grower of grapes, he had been ruined by Quim Torras.

39

Troubles

In a fog of dull despair, Josep finished the harvest in four more days, forcing himself not to think of his problems. But the day after all the grapes had been picked and pressed, he rode Hinny to Sitges and found Emilio Rivera at his midday meal in the cooperage, his ruddy face expressing pleasure as he spooned garlicky hake-with-cider into his bearded mouth. Emilio motioned him to a chair, and he sat and waited uncomfortably for the older man to finish eating.

“So?” Emilio said.

Josep told him the entire story: Quim’s departure, their agreement, and the disastrous discovery of the rotted fermentation vats.

Emilio watched him gravely.

“So. Too far gone to be fixed?”

“Yes.”

“Same size as the one I repaired for you?”

“The same size... How much would two new vats cost?”

When Emilio told him, he closed his eyes.

“And that’s my best price.”

Josep shook his head. “I don’t have it. If I could get the vats replaced before next year’s harvest, I could pay you for them then,” he said.

I
think
I could pay you then, he amended silently.

Emilio pushed away the empty soup bowl.

“There are things you must understand, Josep. It’s one thing for me to give you a hand in fixing a wagon, or to help you replace a door for a church. I did those things gladly because I saw that you are a good fellow, and I like you. But…I’m not a rich man. I work hard for my living, as you do. Even if you were my sister’s son, I would not be able to use prime oak to make two large vats for you without receiving any money. And,” he added delicately, “you are
not
my sister’s son.”

They sat unhappily.

Emilio sighed.

“Here is the best I can do for you. If you pay me now for one of the tanks—in advance, so I can use your money to buy the wood—I’ll build both vats for you, and you may pay me for the second one after next year’s harvest.”

Josep nodded in silence for a long time.

He tried to thank Emilio as he rose to leave. The cooper waved him away, but came after him before he had reached the door.

“Wait a moment. Come with me,” he said, and led Josep across the cooperage and into a crowded storeroom. “Do you have any use for these?” he asked, pointing to a pile of casks, less than half the size of regular barrels.