A Long Finish - 6 Read Online Free PDF Page A

mechanical, muffled by the wooden casks mounted on wooden trestles which lined the walls. For lack of any other distractions, odour had it all its own way – an over-whelming profusion of smells fighting for prominence like plants in the jungle: yeast, mildew, alcohol, damp, fruit, corruption, fermentation. Their luxuriant variety created an olfactory arena whose dimensions apparently far exceeded those of the cellar itself, and this sense of concentration, of too much crammed into too little, gave an almost choking intensity to the musty reek which filled the lungs of the trio working silently in the gloom.
    The division of labour had been established years before, and remained constant. Gianni Faigano, the elder of the two brothers, took the bottles from the rack of wooden pegs where they had been turned over to dry after being washed and sterilized. He filled each with a stream of red wine from a plastic tube inserted into one of the barrels, then passed the bottle to his brother, who positioned it under a metal lever loaded with a cork, which he rammed down into the opening. Maurizio then handed the bottle on to Minot, a neighbour who came by every year at this time to help out with this chore by applying the labels and capsules.
    ‘I hear Bruno’s got a new car,’ said Gianni.
    The sound of his words died away so rapidly that a few seconds later it already seemed uncertain whether he had actually spoken, or if it had just been some natural noise arising from the work on hand, or of digestion, superficially mimicking speech. More than a dozen bottles passed from hand to hand, and were duly filled, corked and labelled. Crouched in their dusty sails among the shadows above, gigantic spiders surveyed the scene.
    ‘One of those off-road jobs,’ Maurizio remarked. ‘And bright red, into the bargain.’
    Another six or eight bottles moved from the drying rack to the filling pipe and then the labelling bench before his brother replied. ‘It’s green.’
    For a while everything continued as before. Then the spiders suddenly scuttled away to the furthest corner of their webs and crouched down, making themselves small and still. A bottle had broken, scattering jagged chunks of brown glass about the floor and releasing tongues of spilt wine to scout out the terrain.
    ‘I’ve had just about enough of this damned argument!’ said Minot.
    There was a long silence. No one spoke or moved. Then Gianni Faigano filled another bottle, which Maurizio corked and handed to Minot, who pasted on a label. The arachnids above crawled back to their vantage points and took up their octagonal surveillance once more, while the bottles resumed their progress from one end of the cellar to the other.
    ‘You know what gets me most about it?’ demanded Maurizio. ‘Aldo Vincenzo’s turned into a national celebrity! There isn’t a man, woman or child from here to Calabria who hasn’t heard his name. He deserved to die like a dog – unknown, unburied and unmourned.’
    ‘It’s our fault for letting those television people talk us into setting up their equipment on our land,’ muttered his brother.
    Minot stroked his moustache with a sly expression.
    ‘I hear you did quite nicely out of it,’ he said. ‘Anyway, if you’d refused, they’d have found someone else.’
    ‘I just wish whoever did it had simply killed the old bastard and left it at that,’ snapped Maurizio. ‘No one would have taken any interest then.’
    They were down to the last few dozen bottles now, all destined for a couple of local restaurants and a select number of private individuals in Alba and Asti who ordered the Faigano brothers’ wine year in, year out, knowing it to be at least the equal of that made by growers fortunate enough to own land which fell within the officially classified area of Barbaresco, Denominazione di Origine Controllata . The property belonging to Maurizio and Gianni Faigano was only a stone’s throw away from that of the Vincenzo