struga picked, of course, the worst time possible to tell me.
We wore our hair dandled up in rags to keep it off our hot necks, allowing the sun to burn our sweaty skin. Our oldest, flimsiest skirts we had pulled snug between our legs and pinned to our backs. There we were, thigh-deep in juice, stomping, squashing, mashing the cool, slimy grapes under our heels and deliciously through our toes, while the harvesters clapped and laughed and sang to Focho de Capa’s fidel. It was a party. A frolic. And a bit of an exhibition. Astruga’s thighs—purple, even—were nothing to be ashamed of, and as for mine, skin was skin, wasn’t it? The sky was blue, the air was hot, the sea breeze stirring our little vila of Bajas was playful, and the splashing new wine was sweet on my lips, its perfume rich enough to knock me over and drown me happily in the old winepress.
And that was when Astruga told me she was pregnant.
Not in so many words, of course.
“Look at the buffoons.” Sweat rolled in rivers off her wine-red cheeks. Jacme and Andrio had linked their beefy, sun-tanned arms and were now swinging each other in idiotic loops, bawling out their song, while the other men slapped themselves and howled, and the married women shrieked with laughter. Jacme and Andrio were great laughers, those two.
“They’re a pair, all right,” I said. My thighs ached from all the stomping, but the music compelled us onward. I’d waited ages for my turn in the press. I wasn’t about to flag now.
Astruga showed no signs of slowing. She leaped like a salmon through her sea of sticky wine. Always a restless one, Astruga. “I need one.”
Maire Maria! She needed a man. Today, not tomorrow. I sighed. Harvest frolics were known for this. All those tozẹts with their lusty eyes upon her, her buoyant chest bouncing practically into her eyeballs, and her skirts tucked up and pinned over her bottom . . . Of course she would feel herself in a mood to pick one of these young men, like a grape off the vine, and crush him against the roof of her mouth.
Across Na Pieret di Fabri’s neat vineyards, chestnut trees blazed with fall color, while dark, narrow cypress pines stood sentinel. Past the trees was the village proper, Bajas, crowning its round hilltop like a bald man’s hat, and beyond it, the brilliant blue lagoon of the sea, my sea, that cradled and fed tiny Bajas, and connected her to the entire world.
Paradise had stiff competition in our corner of Creation.
Jacme chose that moment to scoop a handful of pulpy juice out of the vat and pour it down his throat. Purple dribbles bled into his stubbly beard. He winked at us, and old Na Pieret de Fabri, whose vineyards these were, whacked him harmlessly with her hat.
I looked at all our sweaty purple tozẹts. Great overgrown boys they were, though I supposed I must call them men. “After we’re done, you can take your pick of omes.”
“Botille,” Astruga said, her smile still as bright, “I need to speak with you.”
I lowered my weary leg and caught my breath. I knew what those words meant.
Astruga capered like a baby goat, kicking up her heels and splashing wine into the open, leering mouths of the tozẹts dancing around the vat. And now I knew why, why she’d bribed Ramunda, whose turn in the winepress it ought to have been, to give her this chance to bounce and spin in her purple skin for all Bajas to see. She needed a husband, and fast. Perhaps, she had reasoned, if she played today well, she could find herself one.
Or I could. For that was my job in Bajas. Most tozas helped the family business of catching fish or harvesting salt. Some spun wool or silk; others wove baskets, or helped their papàs and mamàs fashion clay pots. Countless others grew vegetables and tied and trimmed grapevines.
But I, I caught suitors, harvested bridegrooms, wove dowries, fashioned courtships, grew families, and tied and trimmed the unruly passions of our hot-blooded young people into acceptable marriages. I brought them all to Dominus Bernard’s altar in the end. Only sometimes, as now, with a baby on the way, I did not have the luxury of time to plot and plan.
I watched Astruga’s eyes linger on Jacme’s broad face.
“Jacme?” I whispered.
She shrugged. “He’ll do.”
I danced a little closer to her. “Is it he?”
She looked away, and shook her head.
I danced in a circle around her. If she wanted my help, she’d best not turn her eyes away from me. “Who is the father?”
She turned the other way, like a naughty little toza who won’t confess to stealing the honey.
“Tell me,” I pressed. “I have ways of making the father marry you.” And I did. My sisters and I—we had ways all our own.
The high flush in Astruga’s cheeks cooled. “Not this time, Botille.”
Ah. He was married already, then. Well, no matter; Astruga was young and fresh. Weren’t all the tozẹts adoring her even now? This would be easy for me.
“Are you working on another match right now?”
“Maybe.”
“If you marry off that cow Sapdalina before me, I swear, I’ll claw her eyes out.”
It was Sapdalina’s troth I was working on, and while I wouldn’t call her a cow, per se, she was a challenging case. At least she wasn’t pregnant.
“That would hardly be fair to Sapdalina,” I observed.
Her angry face fell. “Oh, please, Botille. I’ll do anything. You’ve got to help me.”
Astruga’s skirt came unpinned and sank into the wine. She squealed and snatched it up, then thrust the soiled cloth into her mouth to suck out the blood-dark juice. Just then the church bells rang, and she let the skirt fall once more.
I looked toward the village, with its white stone walls, its rising houses ready to teeter and topple one another, and the brown square bell tower of the church of Sant Martin.
She’d shown me what, if I hadn’t had a head full of wine and fidel tunes, my instincts should have smelled before Astruga had even spoken a word. The fruit growing in her vineyard was planted by a handsome rake, a delightful talker, a charmer if ever there was one, and the source of all my best clients. I owed him, really. Already a growing list of roly-poly babies had him as the papà they would never know.
Dominus Bernard, Bajas’s priest at the church of Sant Martin.
“Acabansa! Finished!”
Focho de Capa, self-proclaimed lord of the revels, scooped a ladle of syrupy juice from the vat and drank it with great flourish. “Bon an!” A good year, good for the grapes.
We climbed out of the vat. Itier pulled us each out by the wrist onto the platform next to the press and planted wine-stained kisses on our cheeks. We climbed down the ladder. Astruga let herself be seized about the waist by frizzle-headed Itier and led off to the table that had been set up, spread with bread, cheese, salmon, and roasted vegetables. I lingered behind to wipe a bit of the juice off my arms with a rag Na Pieret di Fabri handed me.
Widow Pieret’s eyes were still as blue as la mar, though her face was brown as carved chestnut and creased with as many deep grooves. Her husband, related to the lords of Bajas, had been a vintner, but his death, five years back, left Na Pieret to manage his great vineyards alone. It had been a terrible blow. Still, Na Pieret, who had never been weakened by childbearing, had borne up under the burden admirably. But today, though she smiled, she seemed tired.
“What is it, ma maire?” I genuflected, a courtesy owed to a great lady of advanced years, then I rose and kissed her cheek. All old women were “my mother,” but Na Pieret was someone I could almost wish were my mother.
“Ack! You are covered in viṇ.” She patted my cheek. “Smart Botille. Not a thing happens in this village but what you have a hand in it, is there?”
“Oh, pah.” I unraveled the damp rags from around my hair. “I won’t take the blame for everything.”
Na Pieret leaned against the handle of her cane. I noticed her head quiver slightly. “I need your help, Botille.” She spoke quietly. “I can’t run the vineyards anymore.”
I saw how much it hurt her to speak these words, though she said them simply and without self-pity.
“But your hired help, surely. They do the work for you, non?” I looked over to the feast table, where half a dozen of her hands lounged, stuffing their faces. “Are they lazy? Do they steal from you? Sazia and Plazensa and I can put a stop to that. We’ll teach them a lesson—”
“No, no.” Na Pieret squinted her eyes against the rays of the setting sun. “They are only as lazy as any other laborers ever were. No, they are kind to me.”
“Then what is it?”
“I need a strong back, and eyes I can trust. I need someone who cares about the grapes like they are his own. But you know I have no children to entrust them to.”
The wine on my skin had dried to a slimy, sticky sheen, and I began to itch. Hot breezes from the south did nothing to help.
“My mother had two daughters,” Na Pieret went on. “My younger sister died last winter, leaving her two sons orphans, seven leagues from here, in San Cucufati.”
“Oh?”
She nodded. “I want you to bring them to me. I will give them the farm, and they shall become my sons.”
Seven leagues? I pictured myself traveling seven long leagues with two quarrelsome little eṇfans in tow. What did she think I was, a nursemaid?
“How old are they?”
Na Pieret pursed her lips. “They were sturdy, useful children when I met them last,” she said, “thirteen years ago.”
I smiled, and looked over at Astruga, busy stuffing a piece of bread into Itier’s mouth. “Is either of them married?”
“Botille!” Na Pieret laughed. “You haven’t become one of the desperate tozas yourself, have you?”
“Non, Na Pieret.” I took her by the elbow and steered her toward the table. “But there are always plenty of them about, and now I have two more husbands to offer them.”
Na Pieret tapped my forehead with her swollen knuckles. “Only see to it you don’t marry off my new sons to any of the silly tozas.”
I shoved a half-drunk Andrio aside to make room on the bench for Widow Pieret to sit. “That, ma maire,” I said, “is a promise I doubt I can keep.”