by Noah Gordon
He went to work with the scythe on the brush, which gave him sufficient resistance, so that by the time it was cut, he was happy to pause. He remembered that the hole had been large enough to hide the entire pig, and he realized he would have to shovel a lot of dirt and pack it into the space.
He got down on his knees, bent his head, and peered, but he could see only the first few feet, where daylight spilled into it. Beyond that, there was darkness.
A coolness reached out to his face.
The pole that Jaumet had used to poke at the dead pig was lying on the ground. When Josep pushed it under the overhang, it went all the way in.
Something strange: when he lifted his hand as high as he could in the dark space, and flexed his wrist, he could point the pole downward, farther than he would have expected. When he rested his wrist in the dirt and moved the stick so it pointed upward, the point of the stick moved a considerable distance too.
“HOLA!”
He heard the hollowness of his voice.
Hinny, still in harness and attached to the plow, brayed in protest, and Josep forced himself away from the hole in the ridge to unharness the animal and see to its comfort, which gave him a little time to think. The hole in the ridge was exciting and interesting and frightening, all at once; he wanted to share it with somebody, perhaps Jaumet. Then he knew that he must not turn to Jaumet every time he had a problem he didn’t wish to face himself.
He went to the toolroom and found a lantern, made certain it contained oil, turned up the wick and struck a match, and carried the lighted lantern through the bright sunlight to the bottom of the ridge. When he lay on his stomach and pushed it into the opening, it threw light a good distance forward.
The natural overhang was about twice as wide as Josep’s shoulders and it ended a little more than an arm’s length from his face. Then a roundish hole began and went in for perhaps a meter.
And beyond that, there was a dark, wider space.
Probably there was enough room for him to wriggle into the hole, pushing the lantern before him. He told himself that the boar had been as wide as he was, and thicker. But the thought of getting stuck in the narrow dark place, alone and without help, chilled him.
There were some rocks visible in the overhang, but mostly it seemed to be composed of stony soil from which a variety of weeds sprang. Josep went to the house and brought back an iron bar, a bucket, a mattock, and a shovel, and he began to dig.
When he had made the hole wide enough to enter on his hands and knees, he paused at the opening, holding the lantern forward, and peered at…what?
He forced himself to crawl inside.
Very quickly, the ground made a slight drop. As he went forward, the floor was covered with rocks, but he was able to stand shakily.
It wasn’t a cave. The lantern revealed a place more confined than his little bedroom, not even big enough to be called a grotto—a small, rocky bubble in the shallow hill, the size of a large fermentation vat. The wall to his left was of greyish stone and rose in an arch.
The light of the lantern played crazily as he turned, trying to see, realizing there could be wild things here. Snakes.
Standing there, in a little natural box in the earth, it was possible to believe that small, furry creatures might live here when they were not tending the roots of grapevines.
He turned, reentered the hole and crawled back into the world.
Outside, the air was softer and warmer, and dusk was beginning to fall. Josep stood and regarded the hole in wonder, and then he blew out the lantern and put the tools away.
That night he slept for a few hours and then lay awake for hours and thought about the hole in the hill. As soon as the earliest morning light began to dilute the darkness, he hurried out to make certain it hadn’t been a dream.
The opening was still there.
The little bubble in the hill was too small to be of any real use to him.
But it was a good place to begin. And he took its discovery to be a message that he should start working.
He returned to the house and brought out the tools, and then he studied the ridge above the opening with new eyes. It was unremarkable until he reached eye level, where a large boulder, longer than a man but thin and flat, stretched perpendicular, a natural support for the soil that would be above the doorway. He began to excavate the earth beneath the stone ridge, conscious of the fact that a door would have to be wide enough to admit his wheelbarrow.
He worked first with the mattock and was engaged with shoveling away loose soil, when Francesc wandered into sight. They greeted one another, and the boy sat on the ground and watched him work.
“What are you doing now, Josep?” Francesc said finally.
“I’m digging a cellar,” Josep said.
PART FIVE
The Blood of the Grape
Village of Santa Eulália
Catalonia
January 12, 1876
41
Digging
It soon became a topic of conversation in Santa Eulália that Josep Alvarez was spending his time digging into the ridge. His neighbors were only mildly interested, though a few thought he was becoming odd, and they smiled when they caught a glimpse of him in the village streets.
Winter was the time for cleanup and pruning. The vines on the Torras piece needing careful remedial work, and Josep gave it to them; still, on most days he managed to find a few hours to work with the pick and shovel, and when all his vines had been nicely pruned, he became a fulltime digger. It was always cool but not cold in the hole, and forever nighttime, so that he dug near a sputtering lantern that cast yellow light and black shadows.
Nivaldo looked upon the project darkly.
“When you start burrowing deep, you can get killed by spoiled air. There are bad vapors and…what do they call them…miasmas? Like poison farts from the bowels of the earth, if you breathe them, you die. You should get yourself a little birdie in a cage to keep you company in there, the way miners do. If the bird dies, you run like hell.”
He had no time to bother with birds. He was a digging machine, exhausted when he flopped onto the bed, often still in his gritty digging clothes, his sweaty stink in his nostrils. A warm day was a blessing, for he could grab a proper bath in the river and perhaps scrub some laundry. Otherwise he washed from a bucket whenever he became disgusted by his own raw smell.
The cleared space within the hill began to take shape. It seemed more like a passageway into the ridge than a proper cellar, which he would have chosen to be formed as a square or a wider rectangle. But he dug along the rock wall and the narrow rock ceiling he had found in the original little bubble that had been his starting point, the pig’s haven. The left wall of rock went forward, retaining its slightly curved shape, similar to a long segment of a tube in which the right side had been jaggedly removed. The width of his tunnel was determined by the fact that when he dug beyond the edge of the narrow rock ceiling, there was just dirt. He wasn’t a miner; he knew nothing about shoring up the huge heaviness of earth above his head, so he simply dug the soil away from the existing ceiling and left wall of rock, and followed them forward. Slowly, a tunnel began to take shape, a little higher than Josep’s head and somewhat wider than it was tall, the left wall of rock curving up and into the rock ceiling, and the right wall and floor composed of the dirt of the hill.
In Nivaldo’s newspaper, one evening, Josep read a story about a man convicted of assault and robbery. The criminal was a Portuguese man named Carlos Cabral, a pimp who seduced young women and kept them in a bawdy house in Sant Cugat.
Josep remembered Renata, her misery and disease in the whorehouse in Sitges, and recalled the man of whom she had been terrified, a burly man in a soiled white suit, who had sat outside of her room.
His imagination began to nibble at him. Nivaldo had said that the man who had married Teresa Gallego and taken her away was a repairer of shoes.
Name of Luis Mondres, something like that.
&nbs
p; Nivaldo had said he wore a white suit and smoked Portuguese cigars.
Well, so what?
Suppose, Josep thought…
Suppose this shoe repairer, this Luis, was similar to the pimp in the newspaper, who had married four women in order to make them whores. Suppose this Luis had married Teresa in order to take her to a house like the one in Sitges. Suppose even now, Teresa Gallego might be in a room like Renata’s room.
He forced himself to put it from his mind.
But sometimes, while digging like a mole in the ridge, or lying in bed in a sleepless moment, his memory drifted to Teresa.
He recalled how innocent she had been. The thought haunted him more than once that perhaps, by not being able to return to her, he was responsible for some terrible existence in which Teresa now lived.
42
The Swap
At one point in the tunnel, as Josep dug he discovered that the wall of rock made a sharp turn left for an arm’s length and turned right again for a similar distance, leaving an indentation about a meter wide and half again as deep. He at once labeled the imdentation in his mind as “the wine closet,” because from the moment of its excavation he could visualize it as a space that should be lined with shelves full of hundreds of bottles.
But after the “closet,” the rock wall and the supporting stone ceiling ended, and that fact, for Josep, determined the final dimensions of the cellar—a space about as long as a railroad car and only a little wider.
He had spread about half of the spoil from the excavation along the surface of the lane to the river, but he had carefully saved all the stones and small rocks of desirable size for wall-building, and now he got a barrow-load of clay from the river and started to line the earthen rear and right walls with a surface of stonework, which he thought would be a proper way to finish a cellar. But that project did not go far, because he was aware that the winter was coming to an end.
Soon heat would find its way into the cool space he had worked so hard to achieve, unless he could find a good way to block the opening in the hill.
One morning he entered the church and waited until Padre Pio came forward to greet him.
They exchanged amenities, and Josep proceeded at once to the point of his visit. “What has become of the old door of the church, Padre?”
“The former door? It’s in the storeroom.”
“I would like to buy it.”
Padre Pio regarded Josep reflectively in the small silence that followed. “No, it is not for sale,” he said finally.
“Oh…You’re saving it for something?”
“Saving it? No, not really…I might be willing to trade for it.”
Josep began to feel annoyance toward this priest. He had nothing to trade, and he maintained his silence.
“If you are willing to make a confession and bring your presence to my Mass each Sunday morning, I’m willing for you to take the door.”
Josep felt awkward. “I don’t have…a true faith, Padre.” By now, he knew, the priest must have learned much about his early history, including his having been reared by the village’s two most determined heretics, his father and Nivaldo. “I’m not a believer.”
“I don’t ask that you believe. Only that you confess and come to Mass.”
Josep sighed. He needed the damned door.
He nodded sourly.
“Then we have made a bargain,” the priest said, and taking Josep’s hand, Padre Pio shook it briskly. He took his long purple stole from a hanger on the wall, slipped it about his neck, and led Josep to the confessional at the rear of the church, which he entered from his side.
Josep pushed through the red velvet curtain into the narrow dark space and knelt, his knees finding the reclinatorio. In the thin light from the crack in the curtain he could make out the half wall topped by a metal screen with pinprick holes, behind which Father Pio’s unseen hand slid open a small inner screen.
“Yes, my son. You wish to confess?”
Josep took a breath, and welling up from the memory of his frightened boyhood, the words spilled. “Bless me, father, for I have sinned.”
“How long is it since you have last made confession?”
“…Many years,” he said.
“Well?”
“…I have done things with women.”
“You have committed the act outside of the sacrament of marriage? A number of times?”
“Yes, Padre.”
The priest helped him. “Have you also had impure thoughts?”
“I have, Padre.”
“How often have you had these thoughts?”
“…Every day.”
“Repeat after me. ‘O my God, I am heartily sorry I have offended thee and I detest all my sins…”
Josep did so through his dry throat.
“… because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell…”
“… but most of all because they offend thee, my God, who are good and deserving of my love.”
“… I firmly resolve, with the help of thy grace, to confess my sins, to do penance, and to amend my life.”
Josep finished like a drowning man.
“When you go to your home, recite twenty-five Paternosters. Be thoughtful and penitent, my son. I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father and of his Son and of the Ghost who is holy. Pray that your sacrifice may be accepted to God.
“Let us now leave the confessional.”
On the other side of the red velvet, blinking against the light, Josep saw Padre Pio removing his stole.
“Do you have your wagon outside?”
“Yes, Padre,” he said, startled.
“I will help you carry the door,” Padre Pio said.
He used some of the planks from the dismantled vats to make the doorframe.
Fastening it to the hillside was a challenge. On one side of the entrance he nailed the wood of the frame into a pair of thick old tree roots, and on the other side he drove spikes into a crack in a boulder. The heavy old door was fine for his purpose, once he had used his saw to make it narrower and shorter. The disfiguring cracks did not go all the way through the surface, and the general battered condition of the wood, bizarre in a church door, was fine in the covering of a hole in a hill. In the trash he had cleaned from Quim’s house was a rusted door hinge, and he picked up another hinge at the Sitges market, longer and narrower than Quim’s hinge, but complete with matching rust. Well-oiled and installed, the odd pair of hinges worked with only an occasional squeal to alert the Small Ones whenever Josep entered their world.
That Sunday he bathed from a bucket in the early morning chill and then put on clean clothing and made his way to the church. He sat in the rear row. He was aware that some of the people at the Mass observed his presence with interest. On the other side of the church, Maria del Mar saw him and looked away. Francesc smiled and waved vigorously until his mother’s hand clamped onto his arm.
To Josep’s surprise, it was pleasant to be there. He seldom had an opportunity to sit in one place and rest. Now the sonorous sounds of the prayers, the scripture reading, the psalms, and the hymns, became a blanket of sound that comforted him into unthinking peace. The priest’s sermon on the words of Sant Francesc Xavier lulled him into brief sleep; when he opened his eyes, he saw Maria del Mar’s cold glance and the grinning face of his young friend, the saint’s namesake.
Eduardo Montroig, mourning band on his shirtsleeve, came around with the basket for the offering, and Josep dutifully added his coin. Soon people sank to the kneeling benches, and Padre Pio put on his white stole and began to make his way through the congregation to place the Host into waiting mouths. “This is my body. Take it and eat.”
Josep quickly made his escape.
Communion had not been part of the bargain, he told himself piously.
43
Thirst
Josep knew exactly the grapes he wanted to use, small dark grapes, dense with flavor, borne each year by undefeated vines that wer
e four times as old as he was.
He had never counted the buds on a vine until he got to France, but now as his vines came to life, he checked them and found that most of them produced about sixty buds, except the very old ones, which produced about forty.
Leon Mendes had limited his vines to fifteen or twenty buds, and Josep began stripping his oldest vines down to that number. Maria del Mar came to fetch her son and paused. “What are you doing?” she said, disturbed because every time he rubbed off a bud, she knew he was throwing away three bunches of grapes.
“The fewer the buds, the more strength and flavor goes into the grapes. In the grapes that are left, even the pips ripen. I’m going to make wine.”
“We already make wine.”
“I want to make wine, good wine that people will want to drink. If I can do that and sell it, I can make more money than I can by selling garbage wine to Clemente.”
“And what if the wine doesn’t turn out to be good? What a chance you’re taking, wasting so many grapes! You’re a second son who has managed to get two sections of land, but still you don’t know how to be content,” she said severely. “Why do you torture yourself with grand dreams, with digging a cellar? Do you forget that you’re a peasant? That all of us in Santa Eulália come from peasants? Why can’t you be satisfied with what you have, with our life?” She didn’t wait for his answer but went to where Francesc was playing in the shade, took his hand, and led him away.
Josep continued to strip buds from his vines. Her words rankled, but he knew she was wrong. He had no pretensions; he just wanted to make good wine.
Still…when he thought about it, he knew it was more than that. If the wine turned out to be bad, perhaps he could learn how to make a good vinegar. He faced the fact that he hungered to be able to do work that resulted in making something that was good.