Warm and murky, the new wine gushes from the vat, as from a deep wound, as soon as the expert hand of Ziu Poddanzu removes the cork bung that holds that sea in check. The barrels sleeping on their trestles receive the liquid, which will fill them to the brim, while the many-colored mass loses its vividness, falls gradually toward the bottom, and is reduced to nothing. But the barrels are not inert things; they are not like oil jars. When they receive the must, they know they are harboring a living thing, a thing that will feel imprisoned and will press outward against the staves, trying to break them, seeking an outlet at the bunghole, like lava in a volcano. For this reason the barrels are bound with great iron hoops, and for this reason also, now that all is over, Ziu Poddanzu performs one last rite. Into the big hole at the top he inserts some weird tin contraptions which are immersed at one end in the liquid and at the other in a basin full of water. The whole volcano is reduced to a breath that passes out through a narrow tube and is dissolved in the water. The water breaks out into a hundred little bubbles which rhythmically swell and burst, with a sound like a sob or a song. The cellar, the barrels, the wine, can now be left to themselves. But during the night, when Don Sebastiano is asleep, the youngest boys creep down half-dressed, go into the dark cellar and stay there for hours, listening to that song which they may well carry with them all their lives.
The wine will be born when the last bubble has burst and Ziu Poddanzu has taken away the basins, which will be used another year, and sealed up the bungholes. The broken-in colt will lie in silence there, waiting to take his revenge on the brains and arteries and livers of the men of Nuoro, who will form long, solemn queues in the taverns that sell Don Sebastiano’s wine, unless they come to fetch it directly from the cellar, bearing bottles great and small, because it is the best wine in Nuoro.
But the grape harvest is not over, for when he built the house Don Sebastiano put up a pergola along the various windings of the courtyard, all the way to that accursed oleander in the little kitchen garden, and from this pergola there hung great stalactites of bunches, waiting to be plucked. Pergola grapes (the fact is proverbial) are a very different matter from vineyard grapes. They have the frigid beauty of alabaster, and neither taste nor fragrance. The very wasps disdain them, because they have never seen the sun. Yet Don Sebastiano cared for the pergola very lovingly, pruning it as only he knew how, thinning out the long, long shoots that rested on canes; for if those grapes did not produce wine, they nonetheless had another important function; and this was that when the harvest was over they were useful for “sharing around,” as they used to say; in other words, to show them off to one’s friends. If the truth be told, Don Sebastiano had no friends—no one in Nuoro had friends—but it was the custom that anyone who possessed things was obliged to give, if only to show that he possessed them, and it might even be that there was in this an echo of a very remote agricultural or pastoral community. Surrounded by the boys, Don Sebastiano in person clambered up a stepladder, terrifying Donna Vincenza, and cut off the bunches, laying them gently in the baskets which the boys jostled one another to hold up to him with outstretched arms, the littlest ones climbing up the legs of the others as best they could.
The end of the wine harvest restored the house to its solitude. The odor of must hung about the stairs and the entrance hall for a long time to come, but it was as if everyone returned to his place with the onset of winter, which in Nuoro comes early and is often bitter. The house now seemed to rest on that recent harvest, as if it had risen another rung on the ladder to wealth; but no one felt rich. Apart from everything else, Don Sebastiano would not have allowed anyone to feel rich, even himself. The cemetery was rich. This was the feeling that every Sardinian bore in the bottom of his heart, and it was the answer Don Sebastiano gave whenever anyone, even as a compliment, pointed out that he was a rich man. This institution of poverty bound the father to the children and the children to one another, and determined their existence. For poverty creates around itself an aura of poetry, but it erects a barrier against the world, which is rich by nature. The Sannas in fact, the old Sannas, were afraid of living. They were not like those mercenaries who came to Nuoro from the impoverished villages to make themselves masters of it with official documents, or like the predators of San Pietro, who little by little were making their thievery legal.
Perhaps this was why Don Sebastiano had never allowed his sons to get involved, as he was, with agriculture. It could also be that subconsciously he was covetous of his skill, but in the depths of his soul he distrusted property and had no love of the land as such, which he thought of as a transient thing, for all its pathetic fences. It is called “immovable property,” but he had seen it pass from hand to hand through his notarial deeds, when it did not pass by the grimmer route of the wake and the wax candles. This man of ancient mold, who had put every penny that came from his pen into houses and fields, and if need be would have defended his own with tooth and nail, had some strange foresights: he was afraid lest any of his sons develop a feeling for being a landowner, to the detriment of work, of earning his own bread and butter. He knew that all he had done, and was proud of having done, would die with him, even though unknowingly he did not want this. This state of mind, which may have had an ancestral background of nomadism, was reflected in the house, which for all its respectability remained as bare as a mud hut, populated only by the lives he had put in it, more to suffer it than to enjoy.
But the countryside, discounted as wealth, entered into his children as poetry, which is also a kind of riches, and more dangerous. On summer afternoons Don Sebastiano would mount his horse and ride down to his beloved Isporòsile, the great undertaking of his life, the land he had wrenched from the fury of a stream that fell unrestrained from the Mountain towering above. There was an unspoken war between him and this stream, which in summertime showed its bleaching bones among the brambles, but in winter revealed its true demonic face, tearing boulders from the mountainside and hurling them against the walls that Don Sebastiano had built to protect his garden, rebuilding them thicker and thicker.
With immense labor he had managed to cheat that stream of the little water that survived underground in the season when the sun brings nothing but fire and death. Through a long channel he had led it first into a cistern where one went to drink out of a cork cup (though the water was very heavy), and then into a pond that supplied the terraced vegetable gardens falling almost perpendicularly until they reached an ancient pomegranate tree, which marked the end of the property. No one picked the fruits that broke open on that tree like laughing mouths. Don Sebastiano had better things to do than care about that note of poetry in the midst of his good vegetables. Every day there was a new one ripe, for the leathery sharecropping peasant devoured by malaria knew only how to water the soil with his sweat. He too was in this world only because there was room for him.
Toward evening, when the shadow of the Mountain spread across the landscape, the ritual of departure took place. Into each pouch of the saddlebag the farmhand put a wicker basket full of grapes or figs, apples or pears, and, overflowing on top of that, lettuce or fennel or celery, the trophies of that interminable battle. Then, back in the saddle, Don Sebastiano would retrace his way up the road, the road of his life. His horse, well trained and thinking of its manger, forded the little torrent upstream, and then, in the sunset, from every gateway along the road came other horses and other farmers, and they all rode along with Don Sebastiano, and in their quiet exchanges of conversation each one appeared to be accounting to God for his day’s work. They formed a small procession, riding shoulder to shoulder as far as the drinking trough at the entrance to Nuoro, and then breaking up into a thousand rivulets, without a good-night, each one making for home, the horses finding their way without a touch on the reins, while their hoofs struck sparks in the darkness.
The boys often used to go down to Isporòsile on foot, because the valley grapes were tastier and the figs dripped honey; and then there was the pond, w
hich took the place of the fabled sea, unattainable because it was over twenty kilometers away and Don Sebastiano was unable to imagine any respite in life, for himself or anyone else. But their favorite spot was Locoi, the hilltop vineyard that Don Sebastiano had left in the care of Ziu Poddanzu, because it was already a going concern. It formed a huge rectangle, almost a perfect square of vines amid the sterile allotments of his neighbors, and was overlooked by a nuraghe in which in the course of two thousand years an oak tree had grown. Don Sebastiano had planted the vineyard with his own hands, meaning that he “owned” the hands of the hundred laborers who dug the deep foundations of the protecting wall, under the command of Ziu Poddanzu. (However, in those days there was not one man to command and many to obey, for each man knew his own place and kept to it.) His was their sweat, his was their resignation. In the midst of that desert, in the course of a few years, an oasis of green had been created, the first sign of life for anyone arriving at Nuoro from Orune or Bitti; an oasis that put an end to the nightmare of solitude. The wine from Locoi was clear and light, and went down one’s throat like a cooling stream. The whole of Nuoro waited for it, because it was more thirst-quenching than any other wine. The only man who scarcely tasted it was Don Sebastiano himself. The year of the phylloxera*1 was a year of mourning, of perpetual mourning, because, as everyone said, with the American vinestocks the wine was never the same again.
Locoi was only a rifle-shot outside the town, approached by a broad road that wound up many curves, from which one could see the Mountain and the dark valley of Marreri below, with Montalbo in the background, outlined against a sky that already made one dream of the sea. Don Sebastiano would ride up that road, clad like a shepherd in his sheepskin jacket, nothing more than a fact of nature. But the boy’s went on foot, and in that heady air, in that sweet yet awe-inspiring place, in that infinite silence, unwittingly they felt the touch of poetry. Dreams raced at a gallop over those barren uplands, and caught hold of the boys, and snatched them away from Don Sebastiano. A terrible thing for those forced to live in the real world, which does not allow for the dimension of poetry. The youngest of the boys would one day realize this, when he had left the town, and the landscape, and Locoi, and felt himself still bound to them, among people who had never seen those things, and therefore were unable to understand him. But anyway, after the last curve the road flowed happily out onto the plateau, beneath the brightest of skies, and the vineyard was already in view, with its green or its gold, according to the season, or in the winter with its nullity, for in the winter a vineyard is reduced to nothing at all.
You entered the vineyard through one of those massive gates constructed, like the carts, of oak timbers running crosswise and diagonally, and bearing the antediluvian name of jacas. The vineyard was protected by high dry-stone walls, largely overrun with brambles, which in the midst of that desolate landscape gave it the appearance of a fortress. But inside, as soon as you were past the jaca, it had all the warmth of an earthly paradise. The vineyard stretched out like a great open book, and because a robust wine was demanded from the soil, the plants were kept low, with no more support than a slender cane to which the shoots were tied, and in rows so wide apart that it seemed a waste of space. A large red house, a really impressive structure, rose in the middle, surrounded by an ample clearing, and here Don Sebastiano had had his moment of inspiration, for along with the first vine he had planted a pine tree, and this pine had grown like a giant, giving shade (alas) even to a few of the vines, which wasted away and died. But they could not cut the pine down, for it had become almost a coat of arms. The boys used to clamber like cats up the rough trunk and relax in the breeze, which was always there in the topmost branches, even when the vineyard around it was dead-still and scorching in the sun. Anyway, if the pine tree was the one and only pine tree, and lived its life in solitude, the impassive witness of men and events, the vineyard also had other trees: the figs, with their skeletal branches, which gave forth fruit, either yellow or black, twice a year. They spread along the overgrown paths on the edge of the vineyard, but Don Sebastiano did not take them seriously. In his austerity he could not conceive of a fig as it emerges from night all pearled with dew, or what it becomes as the day goes on, when the sun begins to enter the flesh of it and dwells there until dark begins to fall. This is the real, true fig. The bees know this as they buzz around the drop of honey that oozes, as though from a superabundance of life, from that mysterious little hole; the blackbirds know it as they choose the figs one by one; the boys knew it, when they were out of school, for they would often dare the blaze of noon to fill their mouths with those drops of fire, without peeling them.
In the clearing shaded by the pine, as I have said, stood the red house, which really was nothing more than a vat room (in the days when the wine was still made out in the country), a kitchen with the fireplace in the middle, a stall for two oxen, and—this was something prodigious—a perfectly useless room, intended for the proprietor to rest in, and that needless to say was full of equipment and of figs laid out to dry. But it retained something of the destiny imagined for it (maybe because it had whitewashed walls), for Ziu Poddanzu never went into that room, or if he was forced to do so he was always careful to relock the door.
Ziu Poddanzu was not his real name, of course; that is, the name that would be painstakingly hunted for in the records when he died. But it would be as Ziu Poddanzu, and as no other, that he would meet his maker. He lived at Locoi, even though he owned one of the little houses in Sèuna: his wife and daughters lived there, and worked as servants for Donna Vincenza. When Don Sebastiano had first set eyes on the waste ground that was destined to become the vineyard, perhaps he had found him already there within it, and had built walls and plowed and planted all around him. He was not a servant and he was not a foreman. He was a rustic Don Sebastiano, he was Locoi, and he was everything that the notary had brought into being. I do not think that there were even any money dealings between him and Don Sebastiano. They were born together, had grown up together, and were growing old together. They did not call each other by the familiar tu, because this would first and foremost have displeased Ziu Poddanzu, but Don Sebastiano was godfather to his daughters, and therefore from bostè (the polite form in Sardinian) they passed to voi, which was the happy medium. Between them there was neither command nor obedience, but a single common will, in the sense that what Don Sebastiano wanted had to be filtered through what Ziu Poddanzu wanted, or it was worse than useless. When Locoi was all Don Sebastiano had, and he went there every day astride his pony, Ziu Poddanzu would wait for him at the gate and help him to dismount. Then, side by side, they would walk up the rows of vines, while Ziu Poddanzu, who knew each single plant, would point out the day’s developments, for each day there was something new. On one occasion he had found an early-ripening vine all dry and shriveled, and in showing it to Don Sebastiano he had explained that it had been touched by “the tip of a rainbow.” Don Sebastiano listened, without smiling.
As evening came on, weary and beaded with sweat they would sit in the clearing amid the pungent aromas of wild thyme and cistus. The “rustic” Don Sebastiano, with his kindly face and his noble beard, which was beginning to whiten, would light half a Tuscan cigar, which his employer never failed to bring him; though even more he liked to chew the leaves with the few teeth he had left. Don Sebastiano did not smoke; instead, he drank a glass of water from the well, which was always very cold and clear. And their lives, past, present, and future, flowed out in their ancient tongue, which in their children already betrayed the contamination of time.
Now Don Sebastiano had migrated toward other dreams, toward the warm lands in the valley, and Ziu Poddanzu, even if he guided his footsteps from afar, was left alone at Locoi. Donna Vincenza had a liking for Poddanzu, as she called him, and gave him a warm welcome and a glass of wine on the rare occasions when he came to the house with cap in hand. But in her heart she had a small grudge against him, because (as she would say) h
e breathed all that fresh air. In the absence of Don Sebastiano the boys had been left as masters of the vineyard and the clearing, and their mythical Ziu Poddanzu received them as young masters, but made them realize the limits of their proprietorship. For example, he did not allow them to pick single grapes from the bunches, leaving them disfigured, and would have preferred them to ask him for the grapes, firstly so that when he saw the vines cut he would not suspect some thief or some stranger, and secondly because in that uniform jungle of vine leaves he knew where to find the muscatel plants, and other grapes not used for wine. The boys accepted everything, because the old man had been there so much longer than they had, and they had been brought up to think of themselves as poor. And then, and then... It was not true that Ziu Poddanzu had spent all his life at Locoi, like a clod of earth. In his youth, before Italy was Italy, they had made him do military service and sent him to distant worlds, to places called Narni, Amelia, and Camerino, which were goodness knows where. But it was the world itself that filtered through those names of his into their enchanted imaginations. Now that I come to think of it, and I have looked at the map, to get to those places Ziu Poddanzu must have passed through Rome, but he can’t have realized it, because the boys never heard him mention it. Narni, Amelia, and Camerino, on the other hand, had filled his life, and he would talk about them when evening came to the clearing, and the sun marked the end of another day. He remembered the terrible cold in those places. While out on a day pass on one occasion he had seen some strange, enormous birds in the trees, like balls of wool. “What the devil are they?” he had been asked by another soldier, also a Sardinian. “We don’t have them in our parts.” And they were only sparrows, sparrows just like ours, all puffed out against the cold!
The Day of Judgment Page 8