The Winemaker Read Online Free PDF Page A

the house to rights. He took the dirty dishes and utensils outside and scrubbed the filth and the mould from them, first with handfuls of sand and then with soapy water. He wound the French clock, checking the time from Nivaldo’s clock at the store and estimating the few minutes it took him to walk home. Then he swept the floor, the packed earth that had been polished by a century of Alvarez feet. Tomorrow, he told himself, he would scrub his clothes in the Pedregós, along with the soiled clothes Donat had abandoned. He was aware of his own body stink. The air wasn’t warm, but he needed the luxury of a full wash. When he returned the broom, he noticed that the wooden handles of the tools were dry, and he took the time to give them a careful oiling. Only then, as the sun was sinking, did he allow himself to take the thin bar of brown soap and make his way toward the river.
    When he passed the Torras place, he saw that it was still tended, but poorly. The vines, many as yet unpruned, looked as if they sorely needed fertilizer.
    The next vineyard was the one that had been Ferran Valls’s. Four large, twisted olive trees bordered the road, their old roots as thick as Josep’s arm. A little child was playing between the roots of the second tree.
    The boy watched him as he approached. He was a handsome fellow, blue-eyed and dark-haired, with thin, knobby arms and legs that were browned by the sun. Josep saw that his hair was too long, almost as long as a girl’s.
    He stopped and cleared his throat. “Good afternoon. I suppose you are Francesc. I am Josep.”
    But the boy sprang to his feet and scuttled away behind the trees. He ran lopsided; there was something wrong with his legs. By the time Josep passed the last tree, allowing him to look deeper into the vineyard, he could see the child’s ragged progress toward a figure working in the rows with her hoe.
    Maria del Mar Orriols. They had called her Marimar. The girl he recalled as Jordi’s lover, now a widow, he thought, feeling strange.
    When the boy pointed, she stopped her activity and stared out at the man in the road. She looked stockier than he remembered, almost like a man except for the work-stained dress and the kerchief around her head. “Hola, Maria del Mar!” he called, but she made no reply; obviously, she didn’t recognize the figure in the road. He stopped and waited for a moment, but she didn’t walk forward to speak with him, nor did she give him any signal that would invite him to approach.
    In a moment he waved and continued toward the river, and at the end of her property a curve in the road took him toward the bank of the Pedregós and out of her sight.

4
    The Saint of Virgins

    Everywhere he looked in Santa Eulália, Josep saw Teresa Gallego. There was one year’s difference in their ages. When they were little, Teresa was just another of the many children who ran about the village street and started working on the land while still very young. Her father, Eusebi Gallego, rented a hectare and made a questionable living raising white grapes. Josep had always seen her about, but she didn’t register in his consciousness, even in such a small village, until she was seven years old. Compact for her age but quick and strong, she was the mascot of the Castellers of Santa Eulália. The young favorite of the community, she was the child everyone knew would have been chosen—if only she had been a male!—to be the peak of the human structure of castellers wearing green shirts and white pants, who on public occasions celebrated God and Catalonia by raising themselves toward the sky, standing on one another’s shoulders.
    Some said the castellers reenacted Christ rising into heaven. While musicians played old songs on drums and traditional Catalan oboes called grallas, a quartet of barrel-chested strong men took their places. Wrapped in suffocatingly tight sashes to give support to their backs and bellies, they were surrounded by hundreds of eager