The Winemaker's Daughter, page 30
At dusk on the evening before the funeral, Brunella goes inside and stares at the dead man, the candlelight flickering against Angelo’s frescoes on the wall. It is not grief she feels, but love, and it drives her tears. She feels empty and dark and helpless, because the love cannot go with him. The next day, after a small Roman Catholic service in the stone chapel, Angelo Cartolano is buried in the vineyard among his Nebbiolo, honoring his request that he be positioned high enough in the coulee for a view of Mount Stuart on Judgment Day. Brunella stays behind after everyone has left. She tells her babbo she is sorry, she has to leave the coulee.
CHAPTER TWENTY
SHE WAKES EARLY in the soft mornings of the Piemonte, when the nebbia holds down the light and provides a passage for the last dreams of sleep, walks to the window, and flings open the shutters. It is breathless, these early moments in mid-October, to pull back the curtain of the day and wonder what drama the landscape has in store. The vineyards look like they are pasted against the sky, and then out of the fog will appear the flank of a cream-colored castello or some sliver of a cypress. They are fringe players still, she and Teddy, living in a stone barn above the Tanaro River, living day to day, waiting on Uncle Giacomo. But already they have a routine. She rises first, walks two kilometers to the market at Alba, and buys food for the day. It was their great luck to land in the Piemonte when the white truffles are being pulled from the Langhe Hills, though the tourists have caused the market to spike. The truffle hunters and sellers are ruthless, like drug dealers, sniffing the ground at night with their xenophobic dogs and then lording over the market in cartel style. The Mafia are easier to deal with and certainly less menacing. Brunella has cultivated an old man without front teeth who runs an alimentari the size of an American bathroom in the shadow of a seven-hundred-year-old church. When he sees her, his face lights up; he opens a drawer and peels back newspaper to show off a pale clump—his tartufi bianchi—as if unveiling a rare diamond. She makes him laugh, singing Dino Martino songs for him, Vegas style, like in the movies of his youth. She only needs one small truffle to last the week; the scent of a few shavings will fill the stone barn. She buys eggs, fruit, castelmagno cheese from the mountains, and an oval of biova bread before hiking back to Teddy.
The Tanaro is a thin vein this fall, as the rains have yet to arrive. The river has cut a wide path in its epic wanderings from the mountains to the Po; she can see how it has jumped all over the valley. They eat breakfast outside, the nebbia dissolving, taking on the colors of the sky. She likes to grate a few flakes of the truffle onto scrambled eggs, add scallions, diced tomatoes, basil, and small clumps of Gorgonzola. After breakfast, it’s off to check for Uncle Giacomo. He has been away since they arrived, and she is beginning to wonder if all those Christmas gifts of panettone came from a phantom. The caretaker of his house, Marco Provenza, promises he will return for the grape harvest, the vendemmia, and yet, with the Barbera ripe and the Nebbiolo almost ready, there is still no sign of Uncle Giacomo. Unlike his brother Angelo, Uncle Giacomo is no winemaker. The baby of the family, never married, he pokes and noodles on his land, spending as little time as he can. He sells his grapes for vino da tavola and lives for soccer. Marco says Uncle Giacomo has decided to follow the Milano team around for the Italian Cup. When will he be back? Soon, perhaps. Then, maybe not so soon. Watch the cup. And Marco has some advice for the visitors: Stay away from the Gypsies in town; they will steal from you, using a baby as a ruse to distract you.
The plan is to look for work, while relying on Uncle Giacomo’s help in getting settled. They are anxious to shed the label that people stick to them behind their backs: stranieri, foreigners. They have yet to register with the carabinieri, as the law requires, but everyone seems to know about the green-eyed American woman and the man with the burned face. Alba is a small town. The stone barn, for all its charms and its placement as a white-noise sleep haven above the river, is not heated. When the chill air moves down from the Alps, the landlord will shutter the barn till spring. As Brunella and Teddy ask around about picking grapes, people scoff at them. The harvest is not for Yanks, unless, of course, they’re staying in a tourist fattoria and paying to work. (They pay us to do peasant work, some of these Americans!) Nor, it seems, is grape-picking for the Piemontese. Let the teenage boys from Ethiopia pick the crop. Let the Albanians, the few refugees who could sneak into the country, or the Sicilians who can’t find work in the factories in Torino; let them stain their hands.
In Alba, lunch is always at a small osteria in the piazza near the fountain. Teddy orders foccacia topped by caramelized onions, a plate of olives, and beer, while taking in the movable scenery of shop girls making a bella figura. Every day, he orders the same thing. He knows he must learn Italian; grunting, sniffing, and poking while repeating “mi dispiace, non parlo Italiano,” will not do if he and Brunella are to make a go of it here. Brunella watches the nonne fuss with their boys, always the boys. A baby girl is wonderful, yes, but only a boy can complete your life. And if Italians have the lowest birth rate in the world, in a country that is overwhelmingly Catholic, the worst-kept secret for explaining this phenomenon is the selective womb-culling for boys. The boys can get away with anything.
In early afternoon the town closes up, doors clicking and locking, window bars clanking into place, fruit rolled back under cover, newspapers, shoes, and football jerseys vanishing from display, storefronts putting up blank faces. The men in tailored business suits drain out of offices on scooters; the women hurry home in heels, grandly exiting the strada. In the apartments, green shutters close like dominoes falling to a pattern, as every window blocks out light for the communal nap. For the rest of the afternoon, most of Alba and the countryside is on siesta; even the plants, sunflowers and late-blossoming fuchsias, seem to bring in their petals and nod off.
Brunella loves the siesta. She has a little wine inside her, and she’s pleasantly tired from the morning exertions. Usually, she makes love with Teddy just before sleep, falling away with his scent all over her body. Teddy does not nap. He is restless. He will not be a kept man. She says he should use the time to learn Italian. But he has found an American friend, a man living near Asti named John Gamont, who tells everyone he is Giovanni Gamonni, somewhat fancifully, as a way to hurry himself to his adopted land. He is an orthopedic surgeon from the Midwest who retired early. Teddy and Giovanni play Foosball, go on the Web to check the baseball play-offs and college football, and run. Giovanni says he will make a real runner out of Teddy. His wife says he would take a thirty-six-minute ten-kilometer race over sex with two women. He says, Not true: I would take the two women on a run and then have sex with them.
On the first night in the stone barn, Brunella made manzo al Barolo, marinating the thin beef in the Wine of Kings and garlic, with a side dish of spinach, anchovies, olive oil, and pine nuts blended together. They drank a ten-year-old Barolo for dinner and it was a revelation, even for Teddy, a beer man. She could taste the clay hills and the nebbia in this sweat of the Langhe Hills, and he says no wine ever stayed with him longer, but he will not be a kept man.
One morning Teddy wakes early and complains about pain. He is woozy, his eyes unfocused, his lips parched. Brunella strips back the sheets and finds that his leg is inflamed; it looks like an infection in the part of his hip where some skin was lifted for the face grafts. When he tries to get out of bed, he collapses on the floor. By midday, his temperature soars to 105 degrees, and he starts to babble. The bedsheets are drenched.
Teddy is taken by ambulance an hour north to a new hospital in Torino. She cannot suppress the thought that she is going to lose him as well.
“Tay-deee Flox—this man is your husband?” they ask at the hospital, and she nods. “S, s, un dottore—adesso!—per favore.”
Over three days, two doctors care for Teddy, one of them a surgeon of some renown who is a friend of Giovanni Gamonni’s.
“How are we going to pay for this?” Teddy says. “I have no insurance.”
But when they discharge him with a prescription for antibiotics, Teddy is not given a bill. He is told to call if there is any sign of the infection returning. On the way home, Brunella asks him a question. “Who lives better, Italians or Americans?”
One week they travel south to the Ligurian coast, under the mountains to Genoa, along the autostrada and through its endless tunnels—the cars coming to within a few feet of their tail at 120 kilometers an hour—to the sea, the tip of the land where Italy is sliced away to the Mediterranean, to a chin of rock and a town named for the goddess of love. The tour buses are gone for the season, leaving Portovenere to its quirks: laundry hanging from the windows, fishing boats bringing in squid, men arguing over the awful cheaters from the Lazio team, who may well win the cup. They walk to the top of a fortress built by the Genovese when they ruled a corner of the seas, wind their way up through narrow streets to a church of sea-blasted limestone. In a land where extraordinary spaces devoted to God are as routine as sunset, the church of San Lorenzo in Portovenere is an awakening to Brunella. Built of alternating black and white limestone, with a small courtyard, the church has the oddest of ornaments adorning its entrance: Above the green metal doors under a Gothic arch is a sculpture of a man in a loincloth being cooked to death over a grill.
“What happened to this saint?” says Teddy. He cups his hands in the fountain and takes a long drink of the cold clear water from the spout in the courtyard.
Brunella moves back a few steps and stares directly at San Lorenzo, his feet and legs bound as he lies on his back over a metal grill atop a fire. His face is contorted in excruciating pain, a long way from the usual facial bliss of stone martyrs as they transit from this world to the next. Inside the church it is damp and cool, and her eyes take a few minutes to adjust. She approaches a hollowed-out cedar log, dating to 1204, the inscription says, the century after the church was built. Three old people are in a pew up front, near a confessional. Brunella takes her seat near a bleeding Gesu reclining under glass just above her. She goes into the confessional and tells the old priest everything—the theft of water by her father, how he made one fraudulent vintage, trying to fool the elements, how her reluctance to tell the truth hurt many innocent people, and the rage she cannot shake over her father’s death, no doubt at the hands of the traitor Alden Kosbleau. The old priest seems confused by her sins and her stories, but she persists. Tell me, Padre, how can you explain the deaths of my brother and father? The priest says he is tired and must go home for siesta.
Outside, standing under San Lorenzo, she stares intently at the face again and feels Niccolo in a way she has not experienced since his funeral. She can sense his presence in San Lorenzo’s face, the saint on the grill. Dying once, with superheated air searing his lungs. Dying twice, with the flames.
Giovanni and his wife, Heather, with the willowy legs, arrive in time for dinner. They share plates of tomatoes with mozzarella and sardines and gnocchi di patate, the pesto sharp from the cheese, dining in the small piazza at the base of the hill.
“Why does it always taste better over here?” Heather asks.
“Because you are relaxed,” says Brunella. “You are letting your senses breathe. You are open to all the small pleasures Italy has refined over the centuries.”
“Refined, yes. But tomatoes and potatoes are not native to Italy,” says Giovanni.
“Tomatoes came from Sicily, didn’t they?” says Teddy.
“They came from the New World. There is not a tomato in all of the Italian peninsula that does not owe its birth to an Indian ancestor across the Atlantic.”
“The Cartolano family tomatoes?” Brunella asks.
“Incas, most likely. Same with potatoes. This gnocchi, the polenta that’s been a staple in the north for so long, all of it came from Indians, brought back to Europe by the Spaniards. A lot of Europe would have starved without these Indian contributions to diet. But Heather’s right— it does taste better over here.”
They spend five days in Portovenere. Teddy and Giovanni race up to the top of the small mountain above town, a rock outcrop, timing themselves. Brunella and Heather take a tiny boat to an island just across the water and sunbathe nude on a beach sheltered from the winds. Even in late October, the sun is a warm embrace. At night, they take their passeggiata through town and up the hill. One day they hike the length of the cinque terre, five villages clinging to the cliffs just north of town. Between the villages, the grapes are nearly falling out to the Mediterranean on the steepest of slopes, and some of the pickers are tied to climbing ropes. They eat pasta vongole and whole snapper grilled with rosemary and drink the light dry wine from the vertical vineyards.
“I could live on these cliffs,” says Teddy.
“And would you have a better life here than you had in America?” Brunella asks.
“The clams are bigger in Puget Sound.”
“I know, but who lives better?”
The moldering pessimism that Teddy developed following the fire has been left behind in America. He is more like the boy of summer that Brunella remembers. He reads, he runs, he makes love to Brunella, undressing her slowly at her command; he has started to tell jokes on himself; he even cooks, but of course, he insists through every chore and every pleasure he will not be a kept man. No, ma’am. She cannot forget that he alone knows everything that happened in the fire; he is a second conscience. But she has yet to believe—even during a low moment after a scrap between them—that he would use it. That life is gone.
When they return to Alba, the stone barn is shuttered for the winter. They retrieve a few possessions from the landlord’s cellar and search again for Uncle Giacomo. He owns a tired-looking two-story villa amid a rumpled vineyard on a small hill. He was supposed to be home two days ago, but then Milan beat Parma on a shoot-out and Uncle Giacomo called to say he would be on the road for another month. And how long did you say the tournament lasts? They play though June. Uncle Giacomo says his American niece and her friend can stay in a small apartment on the second floor of his house. It’s no problem, benvenuto, benvenuto, but try not to use too much heat, limit your baths to once a week, per favore, and maybe—if you feel up to it—could you fix the toilet? It has not flushed since Milan lost to Lazio. And when did that happen? During the last Italian Cup.
Noticing the first new snow on the Alps, on a day when the nebbia seems to have disappeared for the year, Brunella tells Teddy they must go to the Dolomites before the skiers show up. What’s in the Dolomites? Teddy asks.
“The Ladin, Teddy. We have to find the Ladin.”
Uncle Giacomo has a boxy Fiat that gets sixty miles to the gallon but sputters like a drunk with bronchitis when forced to run uphill. They are welcome to use it as long as they change the oil, and, say, can you put new spark plugs in as well? Non c’è problema. Oh, yes, the heater doesn’t work either, but who cares when you’re young and in love, right? Buon viaggio.
They spend three days at Lake Como, taking the small ferry to Varenna, where they ask for a corner room overlooking the water. As Brunella has said, it looks like Lake Chelan, albeit with three thousand additional years of cultivation and tailoring. The hotel owner speaks English with what sounds like a Swiss accent and won’t let Brunella talk to her in Italian. The owner asks a lot of questions before she gives them the corner room with big windows. Later, when Brunella comes down alone for a stroll, the owner motions her over to the desk. She whispers, as people do when speaking of an illness or death, “What happened to him?”
“He was burned trying to save a forest in the American West,” Brunella says. “He is a hero. And can I ask you something?”
“Please, yes, and you’re welcome.”
“Where are the Ladin?”
The hotel owner does not know anything about the Ladin, but she warns Brunella to watch out for the Africans—they all have AIDS, they are thieves and stalk white women at night—and be sure to keep an eye out for the Gypsies, who will steal your money using a baby as a ruse, and some Albanians are loose in the north as well. You can tell them by their dirty hair, she says.
Teddy and Brunella walk to the eleventh-century castle above the lake and make love on a blanket alongside the ruins. From his runs and hill climbs with Giovanni, Teddy is getting very strong. She loves the grip of his legs around her and she loves having him inside her, and she particularly loves what he does to her when he puts his head under the blanket and tries to imitate a truffle dog. He has learned something already from the Italians: Everything does go better with olive oil.
In the Alto Adige, the summits hold the first snow of the season while the vine-covered lower slopes are still clad in crimson. They stop in Bolzano, the medieval capital, intending to spend an afternoon with the Iceman. On the way to the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology, Brunella falls for another church door, this inside the fifteenth-century duomo in the Piazza Walther. The vino porta, the wine door, is a narrative of people tending to vines in the mountain foothills. It makes her think of Angelo’s art in the coulee and then, darkly, the legal letters from home that continue to pile up at Uncle Giacomo’s. They look official, menacing, and in need of immediate attention, and she refuses to open any of them. The Iceman was found in a frozen trench near a 10,500-foot pass in the Dolomites, with an arrow in his back and a copper ax in his belt, wearing shoes of grass and twine wrapped in leather. He died 5,300 years ago and is so well preserved that you can still discern the color of his eyes and the tattoos on his skin.
