Clause Eleven

Serena’s office sent the extract at twenty past eight that night, while I was standing at the sink washing the smell of the hopper off my arms, and I read it at the kitchen table with a plate of bread and tomatoes going soft beside me and did not eat any of it.

A will is not written to be read by the person it is about. It is written to survive being argued over. So clause eleven ran to a page and a half and used the word Beneficiary eleven times and never once used my name, and inside all that there were four lines that mattered.

The Option Holder, Teodoro Rinaldi, may by written notice to the Estate acquire an undivided forty per cent (40%) interest in the whole of the property described in Schedule A, at the price of one hundred and eighty thousand euros (€180,000), such option to lapse if not exercised by 31 December in the year in which the grant of probate issues.

Schedule A was the part I had not expected to hurt. It was two pages of my life set out in surveyor’s Italian. The four terraces, given by their cadastral numbers, which I had never learned. The cellar and the press house. The meadow, the boathouse, the two-room cottage where I spent every summer until I was eleven. And near the bottom, in its own line, parcel 214/c, sixty rows, unworked since 1998, which was the bramble terrace above the top wall that nobody had ever explained to me and that my father had mown the edge of twice a year without ever going in.

Forty per cent of all of it. For a hundred and eighty thousand euros, at a price fixed in March of a year when the frost had taken the lower blocks and the land was worth less than it had been worth in a decade.

I sat there with the arithmetic. One hundred and eighty against two hundred and fourteen. A gap of thirty-four thousand euros, which is a used tractor, which is one bad summer, which is a thing a bank will wait for if it can see where it is coming from.

He had been sent this in the November after my father died. I had been, at that point, two months past the funeral and getting up at five to walk the terraces because I could not sleep in the house, and he had been driving down to Como twice a week to argue with the co-operative about my father’s contract on my behalf, and somewhere in among all that a solicitor’s envelope had come to his door telling him he could own a share of everything I had left, and he had put it away and come back up the hill the next morning with coffee.

My father wrote that clause. Six months before he died, with his own hand on the page, he had sat in Serena Nardi’s office and arranged for his partner to be able to buy into his daughter. I have never been able to decide whether that was generosity or a man hedging against me, and I have had two years to decide.

I went to bed at one and lay there working out how to ask.

· · ·Scene break

Pianello has one café and Signora Amadei has had it for thirty-one years, and the only reason I went down on the Wednesday was to settle the bread order for the pickers, forty rolls and two kilos of the hard yellow cake nobody likes and everybody eats at nine in the morning with their hands full of grapes.

“Forty,” she said, writing it down. “And you will want the cake.”

“I’ll want the cake.”

“And you will tell me nothing.”

I looked up. She had her glasses pushed into her hair and her arms folded and the particular stillness of a woman who has been rehearsing since Friday.

“Tell you what?”

“The court signed. I heard on Friday afternoon from my sister’s husband, who does the filing at Menaggio, and I have waited five days, and you have come in here for bread.” She put the pencil down. “I did not want to be told before you. I wanted to be told by you. Those are different, Marisol, and your father never understood the difference either.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yes.” She was not finished. “They are saying in here that you will sell. Not unkindly. They are saying, that poor girl, of course she will sell, and Rinaldi will run it for whoever buys it, and everyone will keep their jobs and nothing will change.” She started the coffee without being asked. “I do not repeat things for pleasure. I repeat that one because you should know the shape of what is being decided about you while you are up the hill.”

It is a strange thing to be handed. I stood at the counter of a café I have been coming into since I was three and understood that the entire village had already had a meeting about my future and reached a reasonable conclusion.

“I’m not selling.”

“Then say so where they can hear you,” said Signora Amadei, “and not to me, who already believes you.”

· · ·Scene break

I asked him that evening, at the press house, while he had the small press in bits on a sheet of cardboard.

“Clause eleven.”

He did not look up. “I know what clause eleven is.”

“Twenty-two months.”

“Yes.”

I had a whole approach ready, three or four different ways in depending on what he said, and he said yes and took every one of them away from me.

“So we’re going to talk about it.”

“The seal on this has gone.” He held it up, a black ring with a split in it you could get a fingernail into. “If it lets go on Thursday night with forty crates in the hopper, we’re pressing by hand into buckets until Sunday. There’s a man in Dongo who has one. I’m going down for it now.”

“Theo.”

“It’s your father’s instrument, Marisol. I didn’t ask for it and I didn’t know about it until a lawyer posted it to me.” He set the seal down on the cardboard, square, the way he sets everything down. “Ask Serena what it obliges me to do. She’ll tell you: nothing.”

“I’m not asking what it obliges you to do. I’m asking why you haven’t.”

“I’m going down to Dongo,” he said.

I stood there a moment longer, because I had one more thing and I had been saving it without knowing why.

“What’s parcel 214/c?”

He was fitting the split seal back onto the ring to check the size of the gap, and his hands kept doing that, and the rest of him stopped.

“The bramble terrace. Above the top wall.”

“It’s listed on its own. Sixty rows. Unworked since 1998.”

“It’s listed on its own because it was bought on its own.” He put the ring down. “There’s nothing up there, Marisol. It’s blackthorn and a wall that wants rebuilding and about four metres of wild clematis. Your father kept the edge mown so the fire people wouldn’t write to him.”

“Sixty rows of what?”

“Dongo,” he said, “before he shuts,” and went out past me into the yard, and I heard the van door and then nothing, and I stood in the press house with a broken seal on a sheet of cardboard and thought that in two years I had never once seen him leave a job half done.

· · ·Scene break

Thursday went the way a good pick goes, which is to say it went like a small war that everybody wins. Twelve at half five in the dark with head torches. The bottom two terraces in small crates, forty-one of them, stacked in the shade of the wall and run up in the trailer in loads of nine. I had the sorting table at the crush pad and I sent back four crates for second-crop fruit and Ettore said nothing about it, which is how Ettore says correct.

At nine, with the rolls going round and everybody’s hands purple, one of the pickers — Nadia, who comes up from Menaggio every year and has picked this hill since before I was born — stood at the end of the row with her back straight and said, to nobody in particular, that the top terrace was ripe enough and it was a shame to leave it in the rain.

Two harvests ago I would have gone and found Theo. Instead I said that the top terrace was on stone, that it was four days behind, and that we would have it in dry on the Tuesday with a north wind through it, and that if I was wrong I would say so in front of everybody on the Tuesday. She shrugged and went back down the row, which from Nadia is applause.

The front came in at five past four, thirty minutes late, and we had been finished since one.

By eight the destemmer had been through the lot and the press was running on the free-run, and the smell over the whole yard was that first-day smell, cold fruit and stalk and wet concrete, which does not last and which I would live in if they would let me.

Theo did the press. He does the press the way some men do a card game.

I came out at eleven with two plates because neither of us had eaten, and I put his on the sill where he would find it, and I said, into the noise of the pump, “Thirty-four thousand euros.”

He didn’t stop what he was doing. “I know.”

“That’s the gap. One hundred and eighty against two hundred and fourteen. If you exercise, I can take thirty-four to the bank with a crop plan and they will wait, because thirty-four is nothing, thirty-four is a bad year, banks understand a bad year.” My voice had gone up. I hated that it had gone up. “If you don’t, on the thirty-first of December they can call two hundred and fourteen thousand euros and I will have to sell the whole thing to strangers within sixty days. Those are the two futures. There aren’t others.”

“There are others.”

“Name one.”

He adjusted the pressure on the plate by a quarter turn and watched the run change colour in the tray.

“If I thought signing that was the best thing for this place,” he said, “I’d have signed it in the first week. I didn’t. That hasn’t changed.”

“Then tell me why.”

“Go to bed, Marisol. You’ve been up since four and the co-op truck is at seven.”

I have been sent to bed twice in my adult life. The other time was my mother, at my father’s funeral, and I did not go then either.

I went as far as the doorway and stopped in it.

He worked all night. He had the racking arm off by midnight and the plate wound down twice more after that and at two he was hosing out the first tray with the light on a lead over his shoulder, and every time he thought the job was finished he found another one, and I stood in the doorway of my own press house long enough to understand that he was not going to run out of jobs while I was still standing there.

He had his sleeves pushed past the elbow and his shirt wet through the back from the hose, and he braced the frame with one hand while he wound with the other, and I watched the whole length of that for longer than a person watches a machine.

I counted crates. Forty-one. I counted them twice and got forty-one twice.

I am going to be plain about this because I was not plain about it at the time, not even inside my own head. I had been telling myself for eleven months that what I felt in that doorway was gratitude, and admiration for a man who is very good at something I am only quite good at, and the ordinary warmth you have for the last person left who knew your father properly. And on the Thursday night of the first pick I stood in the dark and looked at his forearms and knew that none of those three words had ever been the word.

Twenty-six years old. Sole owner since Friday. Two hundred and fourteen thousand euros in debt. And what I was doing with the first night of my own harvest was standing in a doorway at two in the morning looking at my father’s business partner, who was thirty-eight, who had carried my father down off that terrace, and who had just told me to go to bed.

I have felt worse since. I have not often felt smaller.

Ettore came up the track at ten to four for the morning rack. He has a torch he does not use because he can walk that track blind, and he came round the corner of the press house and there I was in the doorway in yesterday’s clothes with my arms folded, and the press running, and Theo inside it with his back to both of us.

He did not say anything. He looked at me, and then he looked past me at Theo, and then he went in to do the rack.

All the next day he was gentle with me. He handed me things. He said padrona once, in the yard, as a joke about the crates, and corrected himself, and I watched a sixty-three-year-old man be careful with me in my own cellar and thought, he saw, and he has decided not to have seen.

That was the day I stopped wanting an explanation and started intending to get one. There is a difference, and it is roughly the same difference as the one between tasting a wine and deciding to find out what went wrong with it. One of them you can do with your hands in your pockets.