The Winemaker Read Free

border knew the best routes for smuggling, and now he took this man’s advice.
    “There are four villages along the high pass at which you may seek food and shelter,” the man said. “You should stop at each one for the night, even though there may still be a few hours of light that would allow walking, for outside of the villages there is neither food nor protected places to sleep. The only segment of the pass over which you must hurry, to avoid being caught in darkness, is the long walk leading to the fourth village.”
    The farmer told Josep that the high pass would bring him into Spain far to the east of Aragon. “You should be safe from Carlist militiamen, though fighters in red berets move deep into the Spanish army’s territory now and again. Last July they went all the way to Alpens and killed 800 Spanish soldiers,” he said. He looked at Josep. “Are you involved in that disagreement, by chance?” he asked carefully.
    Josep was tempted to tell him he had almost worn the red beret himself, but he shook his head. “No.”
    “That’s good sense. Jésus, you Spanish couldn’t have more terrible enemies than when you fight each other,” he said, and Josep was tempted to take offense but, after all, wasn’t it true? He contented himself to say that civil war was hard.
    “What is all the killing about?” the man asked, and Josep found himself giving this farmer a lesson in Spanish history. How, for a long time, only royal first sons had been allowed to inherit the Spanish monarchy. How, before Josep had been born, King Fernando VII, having watched three of his wives die without a babe, was given two daughters in succession by his fourth wife, and persuaded the Cortes to change the law in order to name his first-born, Isabella, as the future queen. This had made piss-mad his younger brother, the infante Carlos Maria Isidro, who would have inherited the kingdom from Fernando.
    How Carlos had rebelled and fled into France, while in Spain his conservative followers had joined together to form an armed militia that had been fighting ever since.
    What Josep didn’t say was that the struggle had caused him to flee from Spain himself and had cost him four years of his life.
    “I don’t give a damn whose royal cul covers the throne,” he said bitterly.
    “Oh, aye, what good does it do a sensible common man to fret about such things?” the farmer said, and he sold Josep a small ball of cheese made from cow’s milk at a very good price.
    When he began to walk through the Pyranees, the high pass turned out to be little more than a narrow, twisty path that rose and fell, rose and fell. He was a mote in unending vastness. The mountains stretched before him, wild and real, sharp brown peaks with white caps, fading into blue well before the horizon. There were sparse forests of pine, interspersed with naked cliffs, tumbled rocks, contorted earth. Sometimesat an elevated height he stopped and stared, dreamlike, at a stunningly revealed vista. He feared bears and wild pigs but met no animals; once, far-off, he saw two groups of deer.
    The first village he came to was no more than a tiny cluster of houses. Josep paid a coin to sleep on the floor of a goatherd’s hut, next to the fire. He spent a miserable night because of tiny black vermin, bugs that supped on him at their leisure. The next day, he scratched a dozen itchy spots as he walked.
    The second and third mountain villages were larger and better. He slept one night near a kitchen stove, and the next night on a workbench in a cobbler’s shop, bugless and with the rich, strong scent of leather in his nostrils.
    He started out early and energetically on the fourth morning, conscious of the warning the farmer had given him. In places the trail was difficult to walk but, as the man had said, only a short section, the highest point, was covered by snow. Josep wasn’t accustomed to snow and didn’t like it. He could imagine breaking a leg and freezing to death or