The flicker of the torches fans into a bigger blaze on the night of the seventh, as the Alcamesi light their bonfires, towering heaps of brush and driftwood, old chairs and splintered doorjambs that have been piled up along the beach at Alcamo Marina or in front of country houses. The flames leap and crackle in the darkness, devouring summer and lighting the way to autumn, although the children who dance about the pyre with manic pleasure may have forgotten that this rite of purification is in honor of the birth of the Virgin Mary.
In that rare and delicate equinoctial moment, suspended between summer and winter and between light and darkness, she comes to comfort us against the obscurity which, gently still but nonetheless inexorably, spreads its shadows over the earth.
Franco Cardini, I giorni del sacro: il libro delle feste
The vendemmia is imminent, our own personal tempus terribile, for although the ripening of the grapes is a yearly event, we have never managed to impose a routine upon our harvest, which is complicated this year by the presence of a considerable quantity of wine from last year that Tonino does not want to sell off just to make room for the new. In order to accommodate it all, he has borrowed an empty steel cistern from a cousin and summoned a bottaio to see if two wooden casks that have stood empty for several years can be reactivated. Our usual bottaio has retired and sends as his replacement a man so small and slight as to seem totally unsuited to a trade that requires the bending of iron hoops and the curving of wooden staves.
I realize how wrong I am when I go into the cantina later on. The newcomer has disappeared, but there are sounds of scraping coming from inside one of the casks. The little door in the front of the cask has been widened to the size of a small dinner platter, and the bottaio has managed to weasel his way inside like a burrowing animal, while a heap of mildewed tartar and sediment is growing on the floor outside the cask. The bottaio’s assistant is his complement, a pear-shaped figure who can push where he cannot pass. He smiles at our amazement with vicarious pride such as the proprietor of a freak show might have. He is accustomed to these tricks, but for me it is a relief to see the bottaio emerge and then drive off, once he has scraped, quicklimed, and pronounced both casks to be sound, thus dispelling images of Pirandello’s La Giara, in which a pottery mender climbs into a broken oil jar the better to glue and staple it, only to discover that in order to get out, he must break it into pieces again.
The next day a truck arrives with the borrowed cistern, which it deposits, flat on its back—some twelve feet long and at least four in diameter—just outside the cantina door. In a hurry to get it into place, Tonino decides that raising the cistern can be a family undertaking and disregards my incredulity and dire prophecies. So here we are, rolling it into the cantina on logs and hoisting it with a series of improvised blocks and tackles. As I pull down on one rope I try not to look at Francesco, who is clinging to the top of another cistern by his toes as he hauls in on a second rope, or to watch as Natalia slips under the suspended cistern to push in the wooden props each time Tonino shoves it a little farther upright.
“This is madness!” I repeat as the great steel cylinder sways above Natalia’s head and Francesco leans farther and farther out. “You’ll kill us all!” But the ropes hold, the cistern hovers for a moment almost vertical, then tips over and settles squarely onto its four squat feet. We clap and cheer and hug each other, and I notice that Natalia’s eyes are sparkling as if we had just raised a Christmas tree.
Not that the preparations end here, however. There are still hours to spend scraping the cisterns and coating machinery and tanks with thick and tarry oenological paint, and wine to be pumped from one cistern to another and the cantina to be swept and washed. Natalia and I leave this to the men; other harvests are calling us, the almonds and the “Italia” table grapes. We beat the trees with canes until the almonds fall, their outer layer of fuzzy green fruit split and wizened into a shriveled gray husk that must be pried off before the nuts in their shells are spread out in the sun to dry.
The Italia grapes are a more difficult harvest. A recent discovery for Sicilian agriculture, this tough-skinned variety of table grapes ripens in September, but with the help of a lot of spraying and then of sheets of black plastic that are spread over the trellises to protect them from the rain, the grapes will keep on the vine until December, when they theoretically fetch very high prices. Tonino put in a trellis of Italia grapes about five years ago as an experiment, but we are too reluctant about using pesticides to make a commercial success of it, and we harvest the grapes in September as they ripen.
Harvesting table grapes is a very different matter from harvesting grapes that are destined for the winepress, since each bunch must be handled with the greatest care. Every day Natalia and I head for the valley floor, pushing a wheelbarrow full of empty crates and carrying our various tools: the big shears for cutting the bunches from the vine, nail scissors with which each rotten grape must be severed from its fellows, clean paintbrushes for dusting off any copper sulphate that may still cling to the fruit, and then big sheets of paper to line the crates in which we must painstakingly arrange the grapes so as to display them to their best advantage.
If such attentions are tiresome, at least working conditions are pleasant: a breeze plays under the wide green tent of the trellis and ruffles the leaves overhead, through which filters a pale yellow-green light, a cool and dappled contrast to the glare of the fields around us. The grapes hang down at eye level, enormous dense clusters of golden green, each grape bigger than a quail’s egg and swollen with sweetness. Wasps, gathering by the thousands for the vendemmia, hover about us as we work, waiting for a grape to fall to earth and split, bleeding the sugary juice from its taut belly, while big brown-and-yellow hornets burrow into the rotten bunches.
Anxious to get the best of the grapes, which are heavily attacked by oidium mold this year, off to the market before the vendemmia starts, Tonino sends Cicco and Nito Pirrello down to help me one morning. Cicco and Nito pick the grapes and load them any which way into the crates, which they then bring to me to be cleaned and dusted and packed. They work at their usual relentless rhythm and I race to keep up with them, snipping and dusting and arranging, my juice-stained fingers sticking in the handles of the nail scissors I use to cut off the telltale tufted stems left by the fallen grapes. I have no doubt but that this job is punishment meted out to me for the many times in which as a child I willfully disregarded my mother’s requests that I break off grapes by the stem, so as not to “ruin the bunch.” It seemed such a picayune preoccupation then, I say to myself as I clip and brush frantically, trapped by the wall of crates the Pirrellos are stacking up around me, in a bucolic version of Modern Times.
Every so often Nito, unable to contain his pleasure in some particularly splendid grapes, comes directly to me, cradling the bunch in his rough and callused hands as if it were a baby and, grinning with paternal pride, he lays it gently on my lap.
“I’ll take the responsibility for this one!”
When no empty crates are left, they stop picking and help me out, holding the little scissors awkwardly in their thick fingers and scolding each other when one misses a rotten grape. We chat about the third brother, Carlo, who is in the hospital, and then I remember to ask about Cicco’s oven.
Tonino came home one day at the beginning of the summer and announced that an era had ended. Cicco Pirrello and his wife had renovated their house and had taken out the wood oven in which Mrs. Pirrello had always baked all the family bread. Tonino seemed quite shocked by such a domestic revolution, and I was curious to know who was the iconoclast in the family and how Mrs. Pirrello felt about giving up a task that must have been so basic to her life and so laden with significance.
“It was her idea,” Cicco answered. “She asked me what I thought, seeing as there are only the two of us at home now, and she’s getting tired. I told her it was up to her. But an old wolf loses its fur but not its vices. Our daughter’s got an oven in the country, an
d my wife has been going out there every Saturday to bake her bread.”
One more element of distraction intrudes upon our preparations when school reopens. Until a few years ago, the schools started on the first of October, leaving us time to get the grapes in first, but someone in the Ministry of Public Education decided that more was more and pushed the date forward two weeks, even though the provincial offices rarely manage to finish assigning the teachers to their various schools before the middle of November, so that some classes limp along on reduced hours for as much as two months.
Alcamo has resolved the conflict between vendemmia and school by not taking the latter very seriously for the first two weeks, during which the attention of both students and teachers is directed elsewhere, but few of the Palermitani have vineyards, so we must attempt to divide ourselves in two. We are up at six in order for me to get the children to their schools in the city by eight-thirty, and then drive out to Bosco again at noon, in time for a long afternoon and evening of homework and farmwork. It is tiring emotionally as well as physically: Francesco and Natalia are vociferously reluctant to drive off and leave their classmates to enjoy the relaxed afternoon gatherings when the pressure of homework has not yet dispelled the pleasure of meeting up with friends again. Even I am ambivalent, for despite the dirt, the noise, and the tension of city traffic, these first uninterrupted mornings in my Palermo study entice my mind toward the writing that awaits me in October.
It is not as if we returned each day to scenes of idyllic rural relaxation. The countryside quivers with suspense, like a racetrack just before the starting gun. In the past the decision to begin was individual, welding convenience and tradition to the outcome of lengthy consultations on the state of the grapes and the weather forecasts, but nowadays everybody bursts into frenetic activity at once, the day the gates open at the big cantine sociali, the cooperative wineries to which almost all the Alcamo grape growers confer their harvest. At sunrise on that day the pickers fan out through the vineyards, lugging big two-handled plastic buckets behind them as they comb the rows, and the roads teem with tractors and trucks loaded with grapes, the corners of the heavy canvas tarps that hold the juicy harvest flapping in the wind and blunt-tipped pitchforks sticking out on top like hairpins. Lines of cars pile up behind the slow-moving tractors or edge gingerly around decrepit trucks, resurrected for the vendemmia but not to the point where their brakes and taillights function. Alcamo changes overnight; the sleepy southern town bustles like a metropolis, and even the shopkeepers and the traffic police simmer with muted excitement.
The caprices of the weather add to the tension: if rain at the end of August was an answer to our prayers, bringing the water without which even the hottest of suns cannot properly ripen the grapes, rain now would be disastrous, for the grapes would rot and the fields would dissolve into muddy traps for the heavily laden tractors. It is hot and cool by turn, and the winds buffet and change and promise no good as we inspect the sky each morning on our way into Palermo. One morning we awake to the scirocco, which dusts the sky to a pale bronze, so that we see the disk of the rising sun as through a smoked glass. And scirocco usually means rain.
The generic pre-vendemmia tension is sliding into despair at Bosco. The borrowed cistern has a hole halfway up that spurts out a fine fountain of wine when Tonino tries to fill it, and the machine for processing the red grapes has something undefinable wrong with it. Unable to find anybody with time enough to come out into the country and fix the cistern, Tonino borrows a soldering iron, with which he manages to close the extant hole and to melt five more holes in the process. Tearing his hair, he returns to Alcamo in search of help, leaving the children and me to hose down the cantina. We conspire as we scrub, plotting how we shall take the vendemmia into our own hands next year, leaving the experimenting and the improvising to Papà, but organizing the routine by ourselves, and not at the last minute, either!
Dusk is falling, and we have almost given up any hope of salvation when Tonino drives up the hill with a passenger, an elderly gnome in a bright red jump suit, thick-lensed glasses, and a beret squaring off his bald head. In the space of fifteen minutes he solders tight the cistern and dismantles the refractory machine, putting a piece in his pocket that he promises to have ready the next morning. He also offers to give Tonino a lesson in soldering.
“On a piece of scrap metal, though,” he adds firmly. “Don’t you go practicing on the cisterns anymore; I don’t want to have to come out and patch them up again.”
Supper is late that night but cheerful, and the next afternoon, while Tonino and Francesco put the finishing touches on the cantina, Natalia and I start harvesting the red grapes, armed with pruning shears (a safer tool than the runcuneddu, the traditional sickle-bladed knife known to harvest fingers as well as grapes) and a stack of plastic buckets. More or less cylindrical and with a handle on either side of the rim, these buckets have a capacity of about two bushels and weigh about thirty kilos when they are full, so that one is grateful, in this case at least, for having progressed from tin to lighter plastic. We each take a bucket and start in at the beginning of a row, cutting the ’ddisa that ties up the branches of the first vine and pulling them open to get at the fruit, seeking in the tangle of stems and tendrils the umbilical cord that must be severed before the bunch can be lifted out and dropped into the empty bucket where it lands with a resonant thud, a sound that becomes softer and wetter as the bucket fills up. The shape of the vines betrays our whereabouts: ahead of us the branches are gathered about their fat belly of grapes, while those behind us are torn and drooping after their delivery.
Harvesting grapes is hard work: one must bend double to liberate the low-growing bunches from the clutch of the vine, and the bucket, light at first, gets heavier and heavier as you drag it along the row from vine to vine until, full up, you leave it where it stands (feminine prerogative) and start in on another one. The ripe grapes burst in the picking and the sticky must runs down your arms and gets wiped onto your forehead and into clothes and hair, attracting flies and wasps and vinegar gnats that buzz around your temples and wade up and down your bare arms.
But the beginning is seductive: we need to pick only enough to give the machinery a trial run, the afternoon is cooled by a breeze that brushes away the insects, and the dark purple grapes, heaped in the blue plastic buckets until they dangle over the rim, are beautiful. When fifteen buckets, a tractor load, are filled, we whistle for Francesco, who drives down the hill to pick them up. We wait to give him a hand as he hoists each heavy bucket to his shoulder and carries it to the tractor, then we start homeward. As we walk up the hill, the sun setting at our backs turns the eastern mountains to copper and paints a ruddy bloom on the grapes that are bouncing up the hill ahead of us.
Unlike the white grapes, which go directly to the press, red grapes must be whirled through a machine that separates them from their bitter-tasting stems and then left to steep in their own juice for several days until the skins give up their color and their strong tannic taste. The gnome has fixed the separator as promised, and it sucks up our little load and whirls it around in a perforated cylinder so that centrifugal force tears the grapes from the stems and pushes them through the holes. They fall, bruised and dripping, into a basin and are then pumped into a cistern to steep. The first of the grapes are in.
The next day numerous Pirrellos arrive to finish off the red and to harvest a small vineyard of white grapes that have ripened earlier than the others and are beginning to rot. They can work for us only this one day, since they are committed elsewhere, and Tonino fears they will not be able to finish before dark, so after lunch he orders all the family down to help. Although our contribution is modest—a Pirrello picks two rows in the time it takes a Simeti to do one—we manage to finish the plot of white grapes by about five-thirty, which is a perfectly respectable time for stopping, even if there are two more hours of daylight left. Tonino suggests that we start back up to the house, but the Pirrellos will have non
e of that and insist on beginning another vineyard while the light lasts. Five days will pass before we do any more harvesting, so to start in anew makes no sense except in terms of the Pirrello sense of duty and justice. In the face of such iron morality it hardly seems proper for us to surrender, so I send Natalia off to help Tonino in the cantina, and Francesco and I stumble after the Pirrellos, trying to hide our exhaustion. Every bunch of grapes costs now, every bending down reveals a new ache, and we can manage to drag only one bucket between the two of us. There are more empty buckets than can be accommodated, once filled, by the single tractor load agreed upon, and Francesco arranges the extra empties so as to take up as much space as possible. Finally, and none too soon, he announces that no more buckets will fit, and we must stop. There is no room for me in the tractor either, and I stagger up the hill, watching the Pirrellos striding ahead of me. Even Cicco, who is sixty-eight. As Nito heads toward the cantina to help Francesco unload, he shakes his head at me.
On Persephone's Island Page 33