The Winemaker Read Online Free PDF Page B

things—rain, widows, fishermen, virginity,and the prevention of miscarriages. For most of the important problems of life, one could pray to Santa Eulália.
    Fifty years earlier, residents of the village had noted that the remains of one of the Eulálias were entombed in the Barcelona Cathedral, while worshipers in Merida had relics of their Santa Eulália in the basilica of their church. The villagers of Santa Eulália had wanted to honor their saint too, but they had no relic, not even a single bone from a finger, and they pooled their meager funds and commissioned a statue of her for their church. The sculptor they hired was a maker of gravestones, a man of limited talent. The statue he made was large and cumbersome, with a disapproving face that was homely enough to be human, but the statue was painted in bright colors and the village was proud of it. Every Santa Eulália’s Day, the women dressed their saint in a white robe adorned with many bright-ringing little bells. The strongest men of the region, including those who served as the base of the human tower, would jostle the statue onto a square platform made of stout timbers. While the men at the front of the platform walked forward with grunts and groans, the men at the rear walked backward; they moved slowly and staggeringly from one end of the village to the other and then twice around the placa, the bells on the statue tinkling as if in saintly approval. Children and dogs chased each other in the platforms’s wake. Babies bawled, the dogs barked, and Santa Eulália’s progress was marked by a wave of applause and cries of pleasure from the crowds of people who had come in their church clothes, some of them from considerable distances, to join in the festivities and pay homage to the saint.
    Josep was acutely aware of the girl near him. They stood without speaking, his eyes fixed determinedly at the building on the other side of the narrow street in order notto look at her. Perhaps she was as bewitched as he. Before they awoke to the fact that the saint approached, Eulália was almost upon them. The street was very narrow at that point. There were only a few centimeters of clearance on both sides of the saint’s platform, which sometimes ground alarmingly against the stone walls of buildings until the men carrying it could make the tiny correction needed for a clean passage.
    Josep looked ahead and saw at once that beyond the blacksmith shop the street was wider but already was occupied by a crowd of onlookers.
    “Senyoreta,” he said warningly, the only time he spoke to her.
    In the wall of the blacksmith shop there was a shallow niche and, taking the girl by the arm, he pushed her into it and pressed in after her just as the platform reached them. Had they still been on the street, the ponderous weight would have crushed and ground. As it was, he could feel the edge of the platform move the fabric of his trousers at the back of his thighs. If the platform had been jostled, injury still might have occurred.
    But he was scarcely conscious of the danger. He was pressed against the girl’s body—so close together—amazingly aware of every sensation.
    For the first time he examined her face, at close range and without being forced to look away after two seconds. No one would ever mistake her for one of the world’s famous beauties, he told himself. Yet to him, somehow her face was better than that.
    Her eyes were of ordinary size, a soft brown color; her lashes were long, her eyebrows heavy and dark. Her nose was small and straight with thin nostrils. Her lips were full and the upper lip was chapped. Her teeth were strong and white, rather large.He smelled the garlic she had had for lunch. She had a very nice chin. Beneath her jawbone on the left side there was an almost-round brown mole that he wanted to touch.
    Everything he saw, he wanted to touch.
    She didn’t blink. Their eyes were locked; there was no other place to look.
    Then Santa Eulália had