The Hand Corker

The bottling was my fault, so I will start there.

The mobile line comes up from Lecco on a lorry and does nine hundred bottles in two hours and charges four hundred euros for the visit, and I had booked it for the ninth of October and the man had rung on the eighth to say his hydraulics had gone and the soonest was the twentieth of November. Which would have been fine, except that the six hundred bottles of the 2024 were sitting in the two tanks I needed empty by the Friday, because the last of the top-terrace fruit was going to finish its ferment that week and had to come off the skins into something, and the something was those tanks.

So: the fourteenth of October, a Wednesday, the two of us in the cellar with the four-spout gravity filler my father bought in 1998 and the hand corker that is bolted to the end of the bench and that takes two people if you want the corks to go in straight.

Seventy-eight days to the thirty-first of December. I had started counting in the mornings.

The storm came over the ridge behind the house at about eight. You hear them before you see anything, a change in the pitch of the wind in the cypresses at the top of the drive, and then the lake goes from silver to gunmetal to nothing at all, and then it arrives all at once. We had the doors shut by ten past. By half eight the gutter Theo had patched in September gave up in the same place.

The power went at nine minutes past nine.

I know the minute because I was looking at the clock on the wall when everything in the building stopped at once, and the loudest thing in the world became rain.

“Generator,” Theo said, from somewhere near the door.

“It’ll run the cooling on vats one and three and the pump and that’s all it’ll run.”

“Then it runs the cooling and the pump.”

Vat three was at twenty-seven and a half degrees in the middle of the hottest part of its life, and if it went to thirty-two we would lose the best fruit I had ever picked, and there was not a version of that night in which we spent generator fuel on a light bulb.

Which left three hundred and ten bottles still to do, a filler bowl with forty litres of wine sitting open to the air in it, and two head torches, one of which had been in the drawer since my father’s time.

“We finish it,” I said.

“We finish it.”

· · ·Scene break

If you have never bottled by hand: one person holds the four bottles under the spouts and watches the level, and when they are full you swap them for four empties and carry the full ones three steps to the corker, and the other person works the lever, and in between you are both wiping the necks and keeping the bowl topped up from the tank. It is not difficult. It is nine hundred repetitions of not difficult.

By eleven we had a rhythm and had stopped talking. My torch was on the bench aimed at the spouts and his was on his head and he kept turning it away from my face, and the room was the size of whatever we were looking at.

At the corker you stand close. There is no other way to do it. He held the bottle square on the plate and I came down on the lever with both hands and my shoulder and the whole of my weight, because that corker was made for a man of eighty kilos and I am not one, and every twelfth or thirteenth bottle the cork would fight and he would put his hand over the top of mine on the lever and we would do it together, and the cork would go in with a sound like a full stop.

He did that seventeen times. I know because I counted, which is what I do.

At about half eleven the rain went from noise to something else, and water started coming under the west door, and we stopped and put two sacks down and went back to it.

“There was a letter on Friday,” I said, four bottles in. “Gruppo Vallese. A woman called Paola Vitali, acquisitions.”

“I know who she is.”

“They’d like to come and look at the terraces. She says, and I’m quoting, that they would keep the Bianchi name on the label in perpetuity.” Four more. “She’s written it as though that’s the generous part.”

He swapped the empties without a word, which is a whole paragraph in Theo.

“They’ll want you as well,” I said. “Three years, probably. They’d be mad not to.”

“Put it in the drawer until the fruit’s in.”

“That’s not an answer either.”

“No,” he agreed. “It’s a fortnight.”

We did ninety bottles after that and neither of us said anything, and I remember thinking that the two of us were extremely good at filling a room with work.

At ten past midnight, with maybe sixty bottles left, I said, “Allowed.”

He kept hold of the bottle. “What?”

“On Saturday. In the tasting room. You said the truth was the only thing you were allowed to give me.” I came down on the lever. Full stop. “I’ve had eleven days of that word.”

“Marisol.”

“Who allows you?”

“Four more.”

He put four empties under the spouts and watched the level, and I stood there with my hands wet and cold and let him have it, because I had decided something on the Sunday and there is no point spending it early.

· · ·Scene break

At quarter past one we corked the last bottle and stacked the last crate and he wiped down the plate of the corker with a cloth, and then there was nothing left in the room to do, and he knew it, and I watched him know it.

“I went to see Serena on Monday,” I said.

He stopped wiping.

“I asked her what it would take. She drew up the transfer deed. It’s forty per cent at a hundred and eighty thousand exactly as my father wrote it, and I asked her to add a schedule of payment, because I know you haven’t got a hundred and eighty thousand euros, Theo, I’ve seen your van.” My voice was steady. I had practised in the car. “Twenty over eight years at two per cent. Or nothing down and a charge on your share. Or you name the number. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that if you sign it the bank gets a hundred and eighty thousand euros before Christmas and they do not call the loan and I do not have to sell my father’s vineyard to a man in Milan who wants to put a glass tasting room on the second terrace.”

“Marisol—“

“It’s on the table in the house. She’s witnessed her part. It wants your name and mine.” I was shaking by then. I had not expected that. “So I am asking you, in my own cellar, at one in the morning: why won’t you?”

“Because it isn’t the right thing for the estate.”

“Say the actual reason.”

“I’ve given you—“

“Then let me take the wrong ones away,” I said, “one at a time, because I’ve had eleven days and there’s nothing else to think about at four in the morning.” I put my hands flat on the bench. “It isn’t the money, because I’ve just offered you eight years to find it. It isn’t that you don’t want to be tied here, because you have been here every single day for two years without a contract and you patched my gutter in September instead of billing me three hundred euros to do it properly.”

“The gutter is not—“

“And it isn’t the land.” I heard my own voice go up and did not stop it. “Because forty per cent of Schedule A is forty per cent of parcel 214/c. Sixty ungrafted rows your grandfather put in in 1934. The thing you have wanted since you were ten years old and watched a man buy it off your father in cash on a Saturday to keep somebody from breaking his legs. I am standing here in the dark handing it to you, and you will not put your hand out.”

The rain did what rain does. He did not say anything for a long time.

“So it isn’t the money and it isn’t the land and it isn’t the work,” I said. “Which leaves one thing on the list, and it’s me, and I would very much like to know what is the matter with me.”

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing is the matter with you.”

“Then tell me.”

He picked up the torch off the bench and held it, pointing down, so that the two of us were standing in a white circle on a wet stone floor with our faces out of it.

“Ten days before he died,” he said, “your father came down to the press house on a Thursday afternoon and sat on the crate by the door and told me he’d had a letter from the cardiologist in Como that he had not shown you. And he asked me for two things.”

I did not say anything. I have never in my life wanted less to speak.

“The first one you know, because he told you a version of it in the hospital in the March and I have heard you repeat it to Ettore. Teach her the trade. Don’t let the co-operative or the bank or Vallese or anybody else take her for a girl with a diploma. Stay until she can run it on her own.” He turned the torch off. It made the dark enormous. “That one I’ve been doing in front of you for two years.”

“And the second.”

“Marisol.”

“In his words,” I said. “Not yours. His.”

The pump came on in the next room, and ran, and went off.

“He said: Not you.” Theo’s voice did not change at all, and that was the part I could not get past, because it meant he had been carrying the sentence about intact, like something in a pocket, for two years. “Not you. Not while she’s mine to worry about.”

I put my hand out and found the edge of the bench.

“He’d seen it,” Theo said. “I don’t know when. I’d never said a word to him, or to her, or to anybody, and I had not said it to myself in those words either, and he sat on a crate in my press house with a letter from a cardiologist in his jacket and asked me to be her teacher and nothing else. And to say nothing to her about the asking. Ever.” A pause. “I said yes to all of it. I’ve kept the whole of it for two years and six weeks, and I have just this minute broken the last part of it, standing here, and I’d like you to understand that I know exactly what I’ve done.”

The cellar smelled of wet stone and the inside of a wine bottle. Six hundred bottles of my father’s last full vintage in crates against the wall, and rain on the west door, and a man five metres away from me in the dark.

I want to say I felt one thing. I felt about nine.

I thought about the day in the June when I slipped on the wet boards at the crusher and he had his hand halfway out and took it back, and I picked myself up and we did not mention it. I thought about the evenings that ended at nine o’clock — always nine, never half past, for two years — and the two glasses already poured. I thought about the row of Sundays when he drove all the way down to Como and back and never once came in for supper. I thought about the fact that he looks past me, down the row, at the netting, at the wire, at the lake, at anything.

I had spent two years believing I was being treated with respect by a man who had decided I was worth it.

And it had been an arrangement. Made by two men, in a press house, on a Thursday afternoon, about a woman who was at that moment twenty metres up the hill in the office doing the VAT return.

“You were both very careful with me,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Nobody asked me anything.”

“No.”

“I was twenty-four. I’d been drinking at that table since I was fifteen and I had a diploma and I was standing in the next room, Theo. I was in the next room.”

“I know exactly where you were,” he said.

I laughed then, which frightened me more than anything else that night, because there was nothing funny anywhere near it. Then I stopped, and stood in the dark, and asked the only question there was.

“And if he had never asked you?”

Nothing. The rain. The gutter he had patched in September, running wrong.

“Theo. If he hadn’t asked. If he’d died on that terrace on the ninth of September without ever coming down to the press house — what would you have done?”

He turned the torch back on and set it down on the bench between us, standing on its end, so that it lit the beams and the cobwebs and neither of our faces.

“Ask me anything else in the world and I will answer it,” he said. “If I answer that one honestly, I can’t stay.”