by Noah Gordon
By the time he covered the shoulders, he was working more slowly, from a step-ladder. He added one more row of stones to the wall and then shoveled gravelly soil, the pebbles and dirt obliterating Peña’s thinning black hair, forever hiding the bald spot. Josep buried the head, added several inches of dirt, and tamped it down.
The new wall was still a meter below the stone roof when he ran out of clay, but now he felt able to go for more with reasonable safety, since anyone wandering into the cellar would see nothing untoward.
Outside, he saw from the sun it was late afternoon. He had had neither food nor drink since the previous day, and as he pushed Quim’s wheelbarrow down the lane past Marimar’s vineyard, he felt lightheaded and dizzy.
At the riverside he knelt and washed his hands. They still tasted of clay as he drank and drank of the cold water, but he didn’t care. He splashed water on his face and then took a long piss against a tree.
The clay bank was a short distance downstream from the end of the lane, but the riverside was blocked by a thick stand of brush. Josep slipped off his shoes and rolled up his trousers; then he pushed the wheelbarrow into the shallow water. He had to manhandle the barrow over some rocks, but soon he was loading clay into it.
On the way back, as he passed Marimar’s vineyard, she stepped out from behind her casa and saw him pushing another load of clay or stones from the river, as she had seen him so many times before. She waved, smiling, and Josep smiled back but didn’t stop.
On his own land he also got a fresh load of fill, and then he went back to work steadily and purposefully.
He paused only once. On impulse, he descended from his ladder and went to where the LeMat rested on one of the barrels. He took the gun and placed it atop the soil in the opening and added several shovelsful of fill.
When the last bit of soil had been crammed under the roof, he laid the top course of stones, scraped the clay binding neatly with his trowel, and climbed down from the ladder.
The rock wall began at the left of the door and ran until it became a stone wall, straight and true, where the closet opening had been. The stone wall ran under the rock ceiling for about three meters, turned right at the end to cover the width of the cellar, and then turned right again. The entire right wall was lined with stone except for a narrow unfinished section close to the door.
All the stonework matched, and the cellar seemed to exude innocence as Josep examined it in the light of the lantern.
“Now you can have him,” he said aloud and shakily.
As he closed the door behind him, he didn’t know if he had spoken to the Small Ones or to God.
54
A Conversation With Nivaldo
“You’re part of it too,” Josep said.
Nivaldo looked at him. “You want stew?”
“No.” Josep had eaten, slept, wakened, washed, eaten again. Slept again.
If you knew where to look, it was possible to see where the spilled blood had been scraped from the grocery’s dirt floor. He wondered where Nivaldo had disposed of it. Buried it somewhere, perhaps. Josep thought if ever he had to rid himself of bloody dirt, he would drop it through the hole in the outhouse.
Nivaldo’s eyes were bloodshot, but the trembles were gone. He looked sober and in control. “You want coffee?”
“I want information.”
Nivaldo nodded. “Sit down.”
They both sat at the little table and regarded one another.
“He came about one o’clock, the way he used to. I was still awake, reading the paper. He sat where you’re sitting and said he was hungry, so I opened a bottle of brandy for him and told him I’d warm up the stew. I knew he was here to kill me.” Nivaldo spoke softly and bleakly.
“I was afraid to use a knife on him, afraid to get in that close. I’m old and sick, and he was so much stronger than I am now. But I’m still strong enough to use the iron bar, and I went straight to it. I came up behind him just as he was taking a drink, and I swung it as hard as I could. I knew he wouldn’t give me a second chance.
“Then I sat at this table and finished the bottle of brandy, and I was drunk and didn’t know what to do, until I knew I had to go for you. I’m glad I finished him.”
“What good did it do? Some other killer will come for us and do the job right,”
Josep said with bitterness.
Nivaldo shook his head. “No, nobody else is going to come. If he had brought other people into it, sent them to kill us, he’d have had to kill them. That’s why he came alone. We were the last two men who could cause him trouble. He came to Santa Eulália to rid himself of you, but he understood I’d connect him to your death, and I knew just enough about him so he’d feel better if I was gone too.”
Nivaldo sighed. “Actually, I don’t know that much about him. When I met him, he said he was a captain, wounded in ’69 while fighting under Valeriano Weyler against the Creoles in Cuba. Once when we got drunk together, he told me General Weyler looked after his army career now and then, because both of them had attended the Military School at Toledo. He definitely had been to Cuba; he knew a lot about the island. When he heard I came from Cuba, we got to talking politics. We ended up talking quite a bit.”
“Was Peña his real name?”
Nivaldo shrugged.
“How did you two get together?”
“At a meeting.”
“What kind of a meeting?”
“Carlist meeting.”
“So he was a Carlist.”
Nivaldo rubbed his face. “Well, a lot of Carlist soldiers and officers were given amnesty and taken into the government army after the first two civil wars. Some deserted and rejoined the Carlist forces; others stayed with the national army and worked for the Carlists from the inside. A few became political converts and spied on their old comrades for the government. At the time, I accepted Peña as a Carlist. Now…now, I don’t know where he stood. I just know he came to the Carlist meetings. He was the one who gave us the information that for the third rebellion the Carlist commanders were going to put together a real army in the Basque country, and he let me know he was looking for likely young Catalan men to turn into soldiers to wear the red beret.”
“Did you know his plans for the hunting group?”
Nivaldo hesitated. “Not exactly. I’m just a country grocer, somebody who did things when he told me to do them, but I knew he was training you for something special. When I read in the newspapers about General Prim’s assassination and the group that had stopped his carriage, I got chills. The timing was just right. I was certain our Santa Eulália boys were involved.”
Josep looked at him. “Manel, Guillem, Jordi, Esteve, Enric, Xavier. All of them, dead.”
He nodded. “Sad. But they went to be soldiers, and soldiers die. In my time, I’ve known a lot of dead soldiers.”
“They didn’t die as soldiers…You just served us up to Peña, worthless meat. Why didn’t you bring us into it, give us a choice?”
“Think about it, Josep. Some of you might have gone along, but maybe none of you. You were just clumsy young bulls, not a political thought among you.”
“You believed I was dead too. How did that make you feel?”
“Heart-broken, you fool! But tremendously proud. Prim was so bad for the country. All right, he got rid of that royal bitch Isabella, a disgraceful queen, but he invited the Italian Amadeus to take over the throne. To think that you and I changed history and helped to get rid of Prim made me feel tremendously proud. Patriotic.” The one good eye fixed him like a beam. “I gave Spain the person I loved most in the world, don’t you know that?”
Josep was chilled and nauseated. “Jesús, I wasn’t yours to give. You’re not my father!”
“I was more father to you and Donat than Marcel ever was, and you know that’s true.”
He felt it was possible that he would begin to weep. “How did you get involved in something like this? You’re not even Spanish, not even Catalan.”
“I
s that how you talk to me? I’ve been Spanish and Catalan twice as long as you have, you ignorant bastard!”
Suddenly Josep didn’t feel like weeping. He met the fury in the single good eye.
“You can go to hell, Nivaldo,” he said.
For three days he couldn’t bring himself to enter the cellar. Then it was time to check the wine casks to see if they needed to be topped off, and he wasn’t going to do anything to endanger the wine, so he went into the cellar and took care of his business. There was just the neatly made wall of stone where the enclosed space had been. On the other side of the wall—on the other side of three of the walls in that cellar—there was the vast, deep solidity of the hill, the earth. He told himself that the earth contained all kinds of mysteries that it was fruitless to dwell on, natural and man-made.
He had a need to finish the work on the cellar. He had used up all all the stones he had saved during the excavation, so he took Quim’s wheelbarrow to the river and collected a load of nice stones. It took him less than half a day to complete the small section of wall that had remained uncovered.
Then he just stood there and examined the place—the ceiling and most of one wall of rock, as nature had made it and he had found it; the other walls that he had fashioned, stone by stone; and his wine barrels in a neat line on the dirt floor. He felt shameless satisfaction and also relief, knowing that it would never again be difficult for him to work there.
In a way, he thought, it was very similar to being able to eat the cherries that grew in the cemetery behind the church.
55
The Joining
It rained very early and with just the right intensity that spring, and by May the air had softened so that it seemed to kiss his cheek, fresh but warm, as he left the house each morning and entered the green rows. A few days before the end of the month the real heat arrived. On the first Friday evening in June, Marimar told him to be careful not to eat from a pot, because everyone knew that eating from a pot would bring rain.
The next morning, the air was warm even while it was still dark, and Josep made his way down the lane and sat in the river and scrubbed himself clean. After he soaped his scalp he held his nose and lay back in the running stream with his eyes open, seeing the hopeful, glittery light of the rising sun beyond the watery bubbles. The river ran over his face as if it were washing away his old life.
Back in the house he dressed in his church trousers, blackened boots, and a new dress shirt, and despite the heat he put on the wide light-blue tie and the dark-blue jacket Marimar had bought for him.
Francesc came a bit early, jumping with excitement, and he held Josep’s hand as they walked down the lane, across the placa, and into the church, where they waited restlessly until Briel Taulé drove up with Josep’s mule-drawn cart, carrying Marimar.
She had no dressmaking skills, but she had paid Beatriu Corberó, Briel’s aunt, who was a seamstress, to make her a dark-blue dress that almost matched the color of Josep’s jacket—blue was a color that would bring them luck, Maria del Mar thought. It was a sensible purchase she could wear for a long time on special occasions, a modest dress, high-necked and with plain, easy-fitting sleeves that widened at the wrists. A double track of small black buttons ran down the front of the shirtwaist, pushed forward by the ampleness of her breasts, and though she had laughed away Beatriu’s suggestion that the costume should include a bustle, the skirt, narrowing from the waist to the knees, showed the natural beauty of her flanks before widening to its full length. On her head she wore a black straw bonnet with a tiny red cockade, and she carried a small bouquet of the white vineyard roses that Josep and Francesc had gathered the day before. Josep, who had never seen her dressed in any but common work clothes, was struck almost dumb by the sight.
The church filled rapidly; Santa Eulália was a village that turned out for funerals and weddings. Before the service began, he saw Nivaldo slip in—it seemed to him Nivaldo was limping—and take a seat in the last row of benches.
Standing before Padre Pio, Josep scarcely heard the intoned words, almost overcome by the realization of his great good fortune, but soon he was brought to attention when the priest took two candles and instructed each of them to light one. The tapers represented their individual lives, Padre Pio told them. Then he took the candles and gave them a third candle to light together, the symbol that they were joined. He extinguished the first two candles and announced that from that moment, their lives had been merged.
Then the priest blessed them and pronounced them husband and wife, and Marimar placed her bouquet at the feet of Santa Eulália.
As they walked up the aisle from the altar, Josep glanced at the place where Nivaldo had sat, and saw that the seat was already empty.
Marimar had prepared food in advance and had thought to spend the first day of her marriage in quiet contentment with her husband and son, but the villagers would not have that. Eduardo set off firecrackers in the placa as they emerged from the church, and the crackling noises followed the wagon as Josep drove them home.
Four borrowed tables had been set up in Marimar’s vineyard, already laden with the donations of their friends and neighbors—tortillas, salads, chorizo, and a myriad of chicken and meat dishes. Soon people began to turn into her path and gather around them. The castell musicians left their drums and grallas at home but two of them brought their guitars. Within half an hour the heat had driven Marimar into the house to exchange her fancy new costume for ordinary clothing, and Josep had rid himself of his jacket and tie and had rolled up his sleeves.
He watched her face, alternating excitement with joyous repose, and he knew that Maria del Mar was having the wedding for which she had yearned.
Their well-wishers came and left, some to come again. It was late in the evening before the last of them drifted away with final hugs and kisses. Francesc had long since fallen asleep, and when Josep moved him onto his mat, he was slumbering soundly.
They walked together to the bedchamber and shed their clothing. He left the lamp lit near the bed and they inspected each other with eyes and touching and wet kisses, and then fell on one another, quietly but with hunger. They were each aware that it was different this time; when she sensed his climax was near she held him, pressing him into her with her hands to prevent the withdrawal they had previously felt necessary.
It was an hour before he left her and went to check the sleeping child.
When he returned to the bed, he still wasn’t ready for sleep, and she laughed softly as he turned to her and made love again slowly. It was a powerful joining, somehow made more intensely their own by their inability to thrash and shout, in complete silence except for the renewal of the rhythms of mating and one stifled groan, like the sound of a prolonged and jubilant dying, that didn’t waken the boy.
56
Changes
Maria del Mar had no great affection for the house to which Ferran Valls had brought her and her child after their marriage. It took very little time for her to move her belongings into Josep’s masia. Her kitchen table was better than his, slightly larger and more strongly made, and they switched the tables. Admiring the French clock and the carved pieces in Josep’s bedroom, she took no other furniture from the Valls house, carrying off only three knives, some dishes, a few pots and pans, and her clothing and Francesc’s.
She left all her tools. When she or Josep needed a hoe or a spade, they would go to whichever one was closest to where they happened to be working. “We are rich in tools,” she told him with satisfaction.
The changed patterns of their lives occurred naturally. The second morning after the wedding she left the house after breakfast and walked to her own vineyard and began to hoe weeds. In a while Josep came with his hoe and began to work nearby. In the afternoon they moved together to the Torras piece, to prune young bunches of grapes from a row he had not managed to reach when he had debudded vines earlier in the spring, activity he continued the following day while she moved into the Alvarez vineya
rd to work.
Without any discussion, working together and separately to do whatever needed to be done, they made the united bodega theirs.
Several days after his marriage, Josep went to the grocery. He knew he would have to continue to shop there. It was unthinkable to travel afar for food and staples, nor did he wish to stimulate gossip by allowing the village to observe any change in his relationship with Nivaldo.
They exchanged evening greetings like strangers, and Josep placed his order. It was the first time he was buying food and staples for a family instead of for only one person, but neither he nor Nivaldo made a comment. He carried the things to his wagon as Nivaldo placed them on the counter—lard, salt, a bag of flour, a bag of beans, a sack of millet, a sack of coffee, a bit of candy for the boy.
He noted that Nivaldo’s face was pale and pasty and his limping was more pronounced as he filled the order, but Josep didn’t ask the older man about his health.
Nivaldo brought out a small waxed round of cheese from Toledo. “Congratulations,” he said stiffly.
A wedding gift.
It was on Josep’s tongue to refuse it, but he knew he should not. Some small gesture would have been normal, and Marimar would think it strange if Nivaldo offered them nothing.
“Thank you,” he forced himself to say.
He paid his bill and accepted his change with a nod.
On the way home he was torn by conflicting feelings.
Peña had been evil, and Josep was glad he was gone and no longer to be feared. But he was implicated deeply in the death of the man. He believed that if he and Nivaldo were discovered, their punishment would be shared. He no longer suffered terrible dreams about the murder of General Prim, but now he experienced other horrifying moments while awake. In his imagination he saw hordes of policemen descending on his vineyard, ripping open the walls of his cellar while Maria del Mar and Francesc witnessed his shame and guilt.