Daniel was stationed by the loading docks, where the sliding doors had been pulled all the way open. He watched laborers hoisting cartons of grapes onto the industrial scale and warehousemen carrying them to storage after the weighing. He looked up, caught sight of Manuel, smiled, and beckoned energetically. Daniel greeted him heartily. “Hey, Manuel! You’re just in time; we’re only getting started with the processing. Come over here, and I’ll explain how it works.”
Manuel watched the growers setting up tightly packed towers of crates, five layers high. Daniel recorded the weights in a receipt book along with the grower’s name, and after the weighing he tore out the carbon copy and gave it to the owner. The process was repeated until the grower’s entire harvest had been weighed. Then day workers carried the crates inside and dumped the grapes out on a steel table. Four men were stationed there, their sleeves rolled up to their elbows. Lucas was one of them. They were picking out leaves, twigs, dirt clods, and stones that had wound up mixed in with the harvested grapes. The official enologist from the Institute of Denomination of Origin monitored the table and cataloged the grapes. The grower stood next to him. Manuel observed the process at first, but soon he felt the need to participate, attracted by the busy flow, the constant rhythm of the work, and the laughter of men celebrating a fine crop. As they handled the dark grapes covered with must, the quality of the harvest was evident to everyone.
He rolled up his sleeves and went to the table. Daniel, who’d stayed by the scale and kept an eye on him, gestured to a worker to give him a work coat. After the employee secured it about him, he looked like a surgeon ready for the operating room. He found the work intense. All afternoon he participated as the grapes were dumped into the press. It rapidly crushed them. Sweet juices rich with sun and fortified by the mists gushed along channels to the chilled tanks waiting below.
The sun had already set by the time the last load was processed. He’d happily identified with the jubilation over the excellent harvest and felt a warm, contented glow. He waved to Lucas. The priest still had his sleeves rolled up and was helping a warehouseman transfer to storage the pomace of emptied grape skins they’d accumulated; it would be used for brandy or shredded for fertilizer. The two of them exited the pressing room, stepped into the warehouse, and encountered cool darkness in the adjoining space. They were drawn as if by a magnet toward the balcony overlooking the slope. The last rays of the September sunset threw the topography into sharp relief. The vista from that vantage point still displayed summer’s exuberant growth, but it seemed to Manuel there was a hint the warm days were waning.
They heard the murmur of voices next door, laughter, and hissing sounds as men hosed out the tanks with scalding water. The workers there were shrouded in steam that stirred the aromatic must of the grapes and sent it swirling up in a white perfumed cloud that hovered just below the ceiling.
Manuel smiled undeterred in the darkness as he groped along the wall to locate the light switches, hearing the scrabble of Café’s little claws against the stone floor. He was starting to regain his taste for life, and it was largely due to this place. He’d arrived wounded and dispirited, oppressed by the stark emptiness of álvaro’s room, pained by Elisa’s anger and cold departure. He’d been wounded by her rejection, which had brought to mind the Raven’s admonition: This will never be your house, nor will my family ever be yours.
That pronouncement had the weight of a life sentence. He’d realized his ache wasn’t because of Elisa’s reaction but rather because of the vacancy that the touch of Samuel’s little hands had revealed. Manuel had been charmed by the boy’s shrill voice shouting in enthusiasm, the row of his perfect little teeth exposed in that wide smile, the laughter that bubbled up from deep inside, and the thin arms that wrapped like sturdy vines around his neck in a powerful embrace.
And he’d been wounded deeply by the old woman’s spite. He reminded himself that she’d intended each word charged with deliberate venom to cause the maximum possible damage. None of it was spontaneous. She must have planned and rehearsed the encounter for days. Her pronouncements had had the calculated rhythm of something rehearsed, a dogmatic declaration carefully prepared. The way the sinister nurse followed the hag’s nonsense and approved like a dutiful disciple was evidence that each and every word came from the black space where her heart should have been. He remembered the studied cruelty and a malevolence that must have been carefully, slowly, and lovingly distilled. The performance had been awaiting the moment she could lure him in as an unsuspecting spectator to a scene only he hadn’t seen before.
He knew that by brooding on her talk he was granting her the victory, something he needed to avoid at any price. Her poison was designed to be drunk in just that way, in little sips that amounted eventually to a lethal dose. Like a busy bee at a fatal flower, he couldn’t resist the hidden malevolence.
He knew why. Even while he’d listened to her, he’d perceived in all that nastiness and hate the poison dart of her rancor, the capsule of mortal toxin and indisputable truth. She knew that candor is the sharpest dagger. She was no fool, and her rant, no matter whether excessive or subtle, whatever its effect in the telling, had been calculated to guarantee her own financial well-being.
She knew that hate alone was far less devastating than coarse candor. His brief encounter with her perverse sincerity had left him mangled and bleeding. He’d come away injected with an unwelcome entity as real as a virus and more terrifying than demonic possession: the unvarnished truth.
Manuel poured two glasses of wine, offered one to the priest, and gestured toward the deck chairs on the terrace. Lucas accepted the glass with a smile. They sat there for a while in silence, content to take in the quickly darkening profile of the hillside. The shadows lengthened and absorbed the remaining light as the two of them drank their wine.
Lucas eventually broke the silence. “You know, since álvaro took charge of the winery, each year I’ve spent at least one day at the harvest. And we always ended it like this, sharing a bottle of wine right here.”
Manuel looked around them as if, somewhere in the folds of time, he might detect the insubstantial image Lucas was describing. “Why?”
“What do you mean, ‘Why?’” asked Lucas, disconcerted.
“Why would a priest participate in the grape harvest?”
Lucas smiled a bit as he pondered the question. “Well, I suppose I could quote Saint Teresa de Jesus. She told us God is present among the cooking pots, so surely God must be present in the vineyards as well.” He paused and mused. “I can find God anywhere; but when I come here, when I work shoulder to shoulder with the men, I’m just one more laborer. I believe that physical labor confers a dignity fundamental to all human beings, a nobility that’s diluted by dull daily routine. I regain that nobility when I come here.”
They sat silent again for a time. Manuel refilled their glasses. He felt it as well: Heroica gathered in a single word, the acts, virtues, and processes so often ignored in daily life. They converged in this place like sharply drawn lines. They endowed it with a sense of the holy, making it a place where weakness, fear, and the abject ruin of the outside world were alleviated and washed away. A place where one could be robed in the fresh tunic of a hero.
He watched Lucas smile peacefully and lose himself in the undulating horizon. Manuel almost regretted having to interrupt that tranquility.
“I already told you on the phone, but I want to thank you again for speaking with Elisa. And with Nogueira.”
Lucas dismissed the remark as if it were of no importance.