Sixty Rows

In daylight it looks like this.

It looks like a man driving a woman up a hill at twenty to six in the morning in an eleven-year-old van with the heater on the windscreen, because she has vats to check and he has a stone and an oil can and thirty pairs of somebody else’s secateurs to finish. It looks like two people in a kitchen at six o’clock not saying very much. It is not, it turns out, a different life. It is the same life with the lie taken out of it, and the coffee is exactly as hot as it always was, and I have stopped pretending I can hold the cup.

I make it some mornings now. He drank the first one I made him, in silence, all of it, and then put the cup down and said it was tepid, and I told him that a man who has been given something by somebody should say thank you, and he said thank you, and went and looked at the netting.

Signora Amadei had it by Thursday. She told me herself, at the counter, while writing down an order for bread I had not finished giving her.

“They are saying in here that Rinaldi has got the vineyard after all.”

“He’s on the day rate with the pickers. It’s in the wages book. Ninety-six euros, same as Nadia’s brother.”

“Yes,” she said. “I have told four people that and it has made no difference to any of them, so you will have to decide whether you are going to spend the next ten years explaining, because I have watched a woman do that in this village and she was very tired by the end of it.” She tore off the page. “I am not going to ask you whether you are happy, because you have the face of a person who would tell me.”

· · ·Scene break

We started the pruning on the eleventh at seven, on the bottom terrace, in a wind that had been coming down off the Alps since the Friday.

I wrote his name in the wages book myself, the night before, under N. and her brother and the two men from Domaso, with the rate and the start date and nothing else, and it took me about four minutes to do a thing that takes fifteen seconds. Ettore came in while I was doing it, looked at the page over my shoulder for some time, and said, “Ninety-six,” and went out again, and I have decided that was approval.

Pruning is the opposite of harvest. Nobody is watching the sky, nothing is at 23.4 anything, and you have four months in which to be wrong in a way that only shows up in September. You go down a row at a vine every ninety seconds, taking last year off, choosing two canes out of eleven, and you do it eleven hundred times and your hands go and your back goes and by eleven o’clock you are having the same argument you had last January about whether to leave a spur on the inside.

He is better at it than I am. He is better at it than anybody on this shore and he will be until he is seventy, and I stood behind him on the fourth of the second terrace and watched him do three vines and then went back to my own row and did them his way and did not tell him for two days.

· · ·Scene break

On the eighth of January I went through my father’s employment files. I had five days left, four names from Serena, three refusals and Theo’s name in my wages book. Then Ettore’s certificate was in my hand again, the one I had put back in October without asking enough.

I telephoned Serena and read her the word.

“That is a different register,” she said.

“Does that mean he cannot supervise the period, or that we haven’t asked?”

She did not answer from memory. She asked for a copy and said she would ring the board.

Ettore brought his folder up that afternoon, in a plastic bag. His registration was current. Behind the certificate were the receipts, one for every renewal since 1989. I asked him whether he would let Serena check it and he said yes, and asked what checking it would commit him to.

“Nothing. I will ask you that separately.”

He left the folder with me.

On the twelfth Serena rang. The board would accept him. She had given me the oenologists’ list in October; she should have checked the other register then, and she was reducing her fee. I took the telephone into the yard before I could start making a plan with his name already inside it.

“You can say no,” I told Ettore. “It is the rest of the practice period, not a signature this afternoon. You would have to watch what I do and tell me when it is wrong. I need somebody who will do both. Will you?”

He looked at the telephone in my hand.

“You will ask me things,” he said. “Not so that I agree. So that I am inside it.”

“Yes.”

“Then give me Serena.”

She drew the resumption that afternoon and filed it at four o’clock on the twelfth, one day inside the ninety. I sat beside Ettore while she read it to him, and waited for him to answer for himself.

I finish the period at the end of October and I sit in Milan the October after that and I will be twenty-eight. Three years, bought back for three months.

Four days later he stopped me in the cellar with his hand on the side of the oak and asked why I had changed the racking date. I told him. He disagreed. We stayed there until we had worked it out, which was what I had asked him for.

· · ·Scene break

Vanoli came up on the eighteenth with the contract and a pen he wanted back.

Two vintages. They take the bulk as before at the same rate; I get three thousand bottles a year off their line at Domaso under my own label; artwork filed by the thirty-first of January. I read all eleven pages at my own table with him sitting there, and changed two things, and he let me have one of them.

Which left the label.

I got my father’s 1996 proof out again and put it on the table with the sheet I had written in November, BIANCHI and RINALDI the same size, one under the other, which I had been so pleased with.

I looked at it for about a quarter of an hour and then I put it in the stove, because I could finally see what it was. It was not a tribute. It was an apology to a valley. It was me answering nine men at a trestle table who had told me Rinaldi had done well with it this year, and answering them in their own currency, which is names on a bottle.

Nobody gets half my label for being talked about in a café.

I went down to via Costa that evening and said I wanted his name back on it, and he said no, and I said I had not asked him a question.

“Then I’d like it left off,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because on the thirty-first of December I gave that away in front of a notary and it is the only thing I have ever given anybody that cost me anything to give, and if you put it back on Friday, then what I did in that yard was theatre.” He was cleaning the stove and he did not stop. “I meant it. Let me have meant it.”

“You did mean it. It’s done and it’s receipted and it can’t be undone and you’ll never get it back by your own hand.” I put the proof on his table. “And now I’m the one who decides what goes on my bottle, which is the entire point of the last four months, and I am not going to run my label round the shape of your conscience either. This is me asking you for your consent, which you can refuse, and if you refuse it the line comes off and I will not mention it again.”

He looked at it for a long time.

“Smaller,” he said.

“Two millimetres is a man hiding.”

“Two millimetres is a man who has been paid.”

“Four,” I said. “That’s the offer.”

“Four,” he said.

So it is this. BIANCHI across the top in my father’s block letters from the printer at Gravedona, the ones a man in Turin told him were wrong in 1996. Underneath, Le Rive — Pianello, and the rule. And under the rule, in four-millimetre type, vinificato da T. Rinaldi.

Bianchi is who owns the hill, called two picks right, cleared sixty rows and sold a boathouse to pay a dead man’s bank. What is under the rule is a job, done by a man, to a standard nobody else on this lake could reach. A job goes underneath. That is not modesty on his part or generosity on mine, it is simply the correct order, and I am the only person alive who is entitled to say what it is.

Paola Vitali wrote to me in the third week of January. Two sentences, no letterhead.

I have bought a hill at Sorico. It has nine hectares, a good south face and no boathouse, and I think of you every time my photographer complains.

· · ·Scene break

We took the cuttings on the twenty-first, which was cold and bright with the tivano going through the wires all day.

Nine vines. You want last summer’s wood, pencil-thick, from the sunny side, cut below a bud and above a bud, and you bundle them and keep them damp and you do not let them see a warm day until the ground has come round. Theo did the cutting because his hands are better than mine, and Nadia and I did the bundling, and Ettore stood on the wall with his hands behind his back saying that in his day they were cut in December.

Three hundred of them. Two hundred and forty went down to the nursery at Colico in two boxes in the back of the van, against the receipt in my name, for two hundred plants by the winter after next and a terrace back in six years.

The other sixty we put in the ground ourselves, one to a row, the old way, straight into the sand over stone where Sandro Rinaldi put them in 1934 when he was nineteen years old and the bank had just taken his uncle’s boats.

I paid for the lot out of the four thousand euros Ettore made me take when he would not buy a boathouse for the exact size of a debt.

In October, on my own wall, with seventy-four kilos of grapes in a bin in the dairy, Theo asked me whether I would let him take cuttings off those vines, and I told him he did not have to ask me, and he said yes I do, and I never answered him. I answered him on the twenty-first of January, in the middle of 214/c, with a bundle of his grandfather’s wood under my arm.

“Yes,” I said. “You can. And you had to ask, and you were right, and you will have to ask me about the next one as well.”

“I know.”

“And I’ll say yes.”

“I know that too,” he said, “and I’d still rather ask,” which is, I think, the closest that man has ever come to saying he is happy.

· · ·Scene break

The proof came up from Gravedona on the last Friday of the month, in a cardboard tube, and I opened it on the bonnet of the van with the wind trying to take it.

I put it back in the tube and went up through the gap in the wall to where they were, and he took his glove off and held the corner of it with two fingers and looked at it about as long as he looks at anything, and gave it back, and said the sand was drier than he had expected and we ought to get the rest of them in before the wind came round.

So we did: sixty cuttings, one to a row, in ground a man walked on in 1934 and that belongs to me; and about half of them will take, and in six years there will be a terrace up there, and not one part of that is a promise anybody has made to anybody.

The second line on the label is four millimetres high. You have to take the bottle to the window to read it, and people will, because people always do, and when they ask me I am going to tell them exactly what it says and exactly who decided the order.