Chapter Four- The Vineyard of Love

Through the forest Gariela and I go until forest turns to cultivated fields and gardens, but I see no farmers or laborers. We follow a cedar-lined path to a walled villa. She points to a massive wooden door wrapped in iron and fixed into a high brick wall covered with vines. When I turn to her again, she is gone.

I knock, and when the door swings open a tall and immensely fat man sings out, "Come in, come in, I didn't expect you this soon." His thick black hair falls down around his shoulders in rich curls, and wrapped in his hair are wreaths of leaves and flowers. His belly hangs over a cloth of shimmery white fabric that stretches around his billowing hips. I haven't had a shirt since I ripped mine to rags to protect my bleeding hands, so to me he looks fully dressed in his flesh. He brings me up close to his naked chest, then lets me go, looking at me expectantly.

Instead, I gaze around at his garden. It's an entire expanse, a huge estate, and I don't understand how it all fits inside these walls, but it does. The endless rows of grape vines cling to trellises, the vines themselves choked with thorns that wrap themselves around their thick stems. In the back is a small house with a red tile roof and white plastered walls in the Arab style, and behind it sits some kind of barn or outbuilding. My host stares at me, still smiling. He waits with arms open wide even after releasing me from his wobbly hug.

It hits me, and I sink to my knees. "Piangi," I say. "Ubaldo Piangi."

"It took you long enough, caro. Come in and have some wine."

"How can you have me at your table?" I ask. "I tried to kill you. It was through no grace of mine that you lived. I don't deserve your favor."

"In wine there is truth," he says, and extends his huge hand to me, pulls me up effortlessly, and throws a pillowy arm around my shoulder. "I used to be a man who held grudges. Now, no more. Now we drink."

He leads me around the back of the house, where the large shed for making wine sits. His feet are black and violet from earth and juice. His body is huge, but like a bubble or a feather he almost floats on the air. Inside the shed are the gigantic tub, the sieves for filtering, the counters for decanting the bottles, and rack after rack to store and keep safe the vintages. On a sunlit patio a table waits for us with two chairs, a green glass bottle, and two glasses.

"Piangi," I say, hushed and humbled. "Forgive me."

"Long ago, amico. Long ago." He pours white wine almost clear as water into the glasses and says nothing, instead waiting for me to speak.

"Do you remember desire, Piangi?" I say, hesitant at first. "I can't remember how it feels, but I can remember what it did to me. Desire, love, lust, I can't tell anymore. All I know is, there you were, an object to be gotten rid of, an obstacle in between me and what I wanted. I strangled you like a farmer wringing the neck of a chicken."

He waits.

"I shouldn't have poked you in the stomach with my sword. I meant to be cruel, to shame you in front of Carlotta and everyone else."

He leans back and his vast bulk fills the large chair. Relaxed and comfortable, he basks in the sun that makes the bricks and his skin glow the same olive-gold. Hummingbirds dart in and out of the vines, stabbing at the bright orange trumpet flowers. I lower myself down into my own chair, swimming in it like a child sitting at the grown-ups' table for the first time. He raises his glass, and I follow. "To truth," he says, "even if it hurts."

I mean to take only a sip, but the whole glassful goes down my throat like liquid gold. Midas, he looks like Midas, turning everything to gold around him, but unlike Midas's golden wine this doesn't sear the throat. Instead, I feel every part of my body coming alive. So that's what bones feel like inside the flesh, with the muscles laid down on them, wrapped up with skin like a present. Decades of married love have made me no stranger to the pleasures of the flesh, but never have I felt so thick, so warm, so heavy between my legs. My muscles, long and hard from the labor of the forest, stiffen with tension and then relax entirely, and I feel each individual one lap the bone beneath it.

"Ubaldo," I say, "I know why I wanted to shame you that way. I made a profession out of hating myself for my face, but I was very proud of my body, so I showed it off. There you were in the limelight where I thought I belonged by right, I went on. At the masquerade ball, every eye gleamed on me with desire and fear as you stood beneath me, fat and ugly. How could it be, that your love stood by your side while mine bore on her breast the sign of another man? I thought my pride in my body could make Christine love me. I was so proud."

He takes another swallow, and fills my glass, grinning.

"What do you do here, Ubaldo?" I ask.

"I bottle the wine that loosens the tongue of love."

"I needed that in life. Was your tongue in life imprisoned like mine, or did it run free?"

"I told my Carlotta she was beautiful often, and meant it. But I did not marry her."

"Why not?"

"She had a husband back in Spain. She ran away from him and came to Paris. I loved her, every day."

"And I tried to take you from her. I am so sorry. It was all so pointless. Where is Carlotta now?"

"She's at the hospital, tending to the very sick."

"The hospital? Where's that?"

"Never mind that now. But back to love … you loved your carissima, the little diva."

Down goes more wine, and my tongue runs free. "She was so beautiful, but I never told her so. I wanted to ask her to marry me but the words stuck in my throat. All I did was show off, expecting her to be impressed. Then when I needed to speak to her the most, needed her to reach out to me, I said nothing. All I could do was grope her blindly in the night, without saying anything."

"You were a boy, caro. The body was a man's, but the spirit was a boy's. A boy blind with lust, but with a true heart aching for love." He pours me another glass, before the contents of his own slide down into his red, wide mouth.

"Tell me," I say. "After I hurt you, did you ever sing again?"

"No," he softly answers. "You broke my vocal cords. I could speak, but always raspy. To sing was impossible."

I want to weep. How do you weep without tears? Even Gariela had tears, but I have none. Over to his great knee I go, to rest my head on it, and the soft fleecy hairs of his leg brush my cheek. "Tell me what you want me to do."

He takes my head in his great hands and lifts it up, forgiveness and love filling his face. "First you sleep. There's a lot to do. First you rest."

He leads me into the shed, to a rough cot in the corner. My legs wobble but he catches me, and before I even feel the blanket under me I sleep.

No other sleep could be as deep or refreshing as this. I wake up and the same golden sun blankets the courtyard and part of the shed, but not the shadow in my corner. The life moves in my body even more vigorously after my sleep than before. Up I spring, and I see him bouncing over the flagstones. He sings in a lilting language I don't understand, but it must be about the delight of the sun on his body, because he slaps his flesh every so often and laughs at the chorus.

"Time to work," he says, and we head off to the vineyard. A few of the trellises have been cleared, but thorns and weeds choke the rest as far as the eye can see. I touch a thorn experimentally, and a tiny drop of blood forms on the tip of my finger. Like a nettle, it stings.

I see what I have to do.

The first grip around the thornbush fills my hand with pain that shoots straight up my arm. I try to dodge around the sharp points, but they graze my skin anyway. The roots are lodged in deep, and if I pull without care, up will come the vine as well.

I manage to get through a row, lining the refuse in between the rows of trellises. When I finish a row, I pick them up all in my arms, and carry them to the brush pile behind the shed.

At the end, my chest and arms are covered with blood and my pants are torn in several places. That was one row. Now there's another. On I go, the thorns stinging me in a thousand places like fire. My back hurts, but when I squat for a moment down on my haunches, my trousers tear right up the back. Humiliated, I keep on.

Ubaldo comes for me. Back in the shed, he sponges me off and puts oil on my hands and chest.

Then I go out again, and after working row after row, it gets better. I know just where to pull to get the whole weed out, slipping my fingers in between the sharp points. Up the thorn plants pile faster, and as my hands grow practiced with repetition, my attention goes to the grapes themselves. The vines are old and well-established, but the new little grapes have just formed. They're hard and sour still, but can't be disturbed or they'll be spoiled.

Then I notice that not all the grapes are green; some are full in ripeness, and their curly tendrils stretch out and almost grasp my hands as I pass over them. Ubaldo comes and picks these. Soon, he says, I can help him.

My hands grow tough, and my trousers wear to rags. I come in from the vineyard naked, and Ubaldo remarks, "Those trousers lasted longer than I thought. Here, I have something better." He hands me a short white tunic and it goes over my skin like air, as if I'm wearing nothing at all. Back among the rows I notice that the thorns won't pierce it, and even when they stick me hard through the cloth, there's no pain. My hands are tough now, and I can go through a whole row with hardly a scratch.

Ubaldo tells me that it's time for the burning. The brushy, thorny pile behind the shed towers over it now, and he brings a torch. It blazes brighter than a theater spotlight, without flames.

"Wait," I cry. "Won't you burn the shed?'

"The shed has no lust," he laughs. "Why should it be consumed?"

He tosses the torch onto the pile, which erupts into a roaring mountain of flame. In the dancing blaze I see myself hungering after Christine, lulling her into a dream of desire, running my hands over the bodice of her dress, stroking her with my fingers until she writhes on my bed. In that pitiless light I see all the pointless meanderings of my own hands driven by loneliness and despair. There's Meg's sweet face as I plunge into her blindly in the deepest pitch black of the tiny cave where we hid. I search for the kisses Christine gave me, the first kisses ever to grace my mouth, but in the blaze they are nowhere to be found. Then there's nothing but white ash and smoke which gently blows onto me, covering me with a grey scum.

"We have to wash you now," Ubaldo says.

In the courtyard we go to the tinkling fountain. He motions to me to get in and the water seems to leap up over me, to play over my limbs and chest and backside. "Scrub yourself," he orders. "Take your tunic and scrub yourself." The ash dissolves away as I rub over all my skin. I don't want to touch my private parts, private no longer in the warm sun, but Ubaldo gestures towards my manhood. "All of you," and finally when I'm clean he says, "Now you learn to make wine."

We gather enormous baskets of grapes and then he climbs into the vast tub with me. We dance, we squish, we cover ourselves with violet goo until it squeezes everywhere on and around us. He holds the sieve and I press the juice through it. "Save the skins," he says. "This time we make it red."

We mix the culture into the juice, then pour it into great vessels. As it ripens, I wash the bottles of clear green glass and cut corks from the long sheets. Then we're ready to decant the wine into the bottles, and it pours out a dark, rich red that's almost black. There the bottles sit, row upon row, the wine dark inside the green. One bottle, the last, I can't bear to cork. Its smell lures me.

"Ubaldo, can we have some?"

"I never thought you'd ask," he chuckles, and brings the glasses. I smell it before taking it into my mouth. Faint spice mixes with the yeast, and it smells dry. He holds up his glass and we clink them together, lightly, and then down it goes. Dry it is, and fresh on my mouth.

"Sing with me," I say, loud and loose now. "Teach me a song," and he sings an old Italian tavern song that goes on in a circle, and we laugh so hard we can sing no more.

Someone has joined us. It is a bent, shambling man wearing the same dark kind of coat as Gariela, with an old, lined face kind underneath thinning hair. "Amico!" Ubaldo shouts, leaping to his feet. "Come have some new wine." Ubaldo and he embrace, and as the shabby man approaches me with his hand outstretched, I know him at once. As he takes his hand in mine, he says, "We're better met this time, aren't we?"

There's a warm space inside me full of light, where shame used to be. Even so, I remember his presence in the black of that night, when Christine slept on my bed, and I toyed with myself in a futile effort to hold back loneliness and despair, deaf to him then but knowing him now. "Tell me your name," I beg.

"Damael, friend of Gariela, and friend to you." Ubaldo bustles over with another glass. I ask the little man, "Gariela, where is she?"

"Preparing the way for the work you have yet to do. Ubaldo, this is magnificent, and will be even more so when it ages."

"Thank our friend here," he beams at me.

"I avert my eyes and fight the urge to weep, but lose. This time when I put my face in my hands the tears do come, real tears that run salty into my mouth. Damael lays his hand on my shoulder and says, "Don't be anxious. There's no more wrong desire for you, not anymore."

Ubaldo fills our glasses and as the last dry and tangy mouthful goes down, I miss the villa already, with its scrubbed white walls and hanging pendulous plants, with its vast rows of vines and the yeasty smell of grapeskin. I haven't even left yet but I take it all in with my eyes, to keep it there before me.

"Tell me, please, my host. What's in these bottles that we've been filling?"

His fat face is serious. "The husband inside the wife, the wife around the husband, tender and generous."

"My Meg would like this wine."

"She drank of it long ago," Ubaldo answers.

The air grows still and when the other two rise, so do I. "God speed you, caro," Ubaldo says, and kisses me warmly on both cheeks, his great fat stomach squashed against mine, and I hold his soft flesh hard, not wanting to let go.

"Thank you," I whisper. "Thank you."

Then Damael says, "We must dress you."

"For what?" I've been without clothes so long, I can't imagine putting them on again.

"Not for your sake," he answers, "but for hers."

The ground seems to shake under me. "Where is she?"

"A long, long way away." He hands me a light shirt and grey pants, with a soft cap. "She will think you're the gardener. Don't be alarmed. She doesn't see clearly yet." Seeing me hesitate, he asks, "Can you do this? If not, tell me. There are other visits we can make."

"No," I say. "I'm ready."

(To be continued.)