Chapter 6
Matej
He is up before light and in the cheese room by six, and the work does not ask who is in the house.
He cuts the curd and breaks it down by hand, never the whisk, his own preference. Then the long part: he cooks it slow and hot and stirs, two hours of it, the boring stretch in the good way, and somewhere in there he puts the podcast in.
It is the long kind, four hours, one man and a story that actually happened: a city five hundred years ago that decided the world was ending, and the tailor who talked his way into being its king. It gets worse from there, and better. He listens to all of it.
Four days ago he would have heard it and let it go.
He keeps it instead, to hand over later, and catches himself doing it, hoarding a story for somebody, and goes back to the pot.
He tests a handful of curds near the end, squeezes it to a mass, presses it apart between thumb and finger.
It holds, splits clean, springs back. He doesn’t time it.
He reads it. Later, in the molds, the whey runs off them clear.
Around midday he goes up to the house. He cuts the trim from a wheel that won’t grade out, lays it over bread, puts it under the grill until it slumps and browns at the edges, eats it standing at the counter.
There is a cup beside the sink that is not his, a cold film of coffee dried in the bottom, stood there since morning.
He washes it, dries it, puts it away, and the cupboard sits wrong with it in there, full by one cup.
He stays at the sink longer than the cup warrants.
The house is quiet in the ordinary way, the fridge cycling, a fly somewhere against the glass, and under all of it he notices he is listening towards the stairs, for the give of the boards under a second person up there.
The boards do nothing. He dries his hands.
When he goes back out he pulls the kitchen door shut behind him soft, the latch barely catching, the pull you use for a door with someone asleep behind it.
No one is asleep upstairs. The bed is made.
The car has been gone since early and will not be back before dark.
He stands with his hand flat on the door a second longer than the door needs, then lets it go.
The afternoon is the cave. He flips the wheels from three weeks back and washes their rinds, a cloth wrung out in brine, each one wiped down and set back tacky and faintly orange on the board.
He presses a thumb to one and gets the right give.
The smell in that chamber would turn a stranger’s stomach, sharp and animal and close to rotten, and to him it means everything is going right.
The light crosses the yard and climbs the far wall and goes.
He has lived alone here a long time and knows the shape of a day with nobody in it, and this is that shape, almost. The difference is small and he cannot find where it sits. He flips the next wheel.
Luca
The vineyard estate sits at the end of a white gravel road, and the woman meets him in the yard with her sleeves already pushed past the elbow, as if he is late, though he is twenty minutes early.
She does not offer coffee. She offers the cellar.
Luca has done enough of these to know this is the better offer, and follows her down.
The steps are cut stone, worn into a shallow trough down the middle by however many feet over however many years.
The cold comes up to meet him. By the bottom the air has changed completely, thicker and mineral and faintly sweet, wet stone and old oak and wine that has been breathing in the dark long enough to leave its smell on everything.
One bulb burns at the far end. The rest is whatever light follows them down the stairwell.
His eyes need a second to find the edges of the room.
He does not take out his phone. He does not reach for a notebook.
He worked that out in his twenties, across a table from a man who shut like a door the moment a pen appeared and opened again the moment it went away.
People perform for the record. They tell the truth to someone who is only standing there listening.
So he stands there. He keeps his hands in his coat and lets her talk and stores what matters where he keeps the rest.
She gives him the Teran first, because everyone comes for the Teran, the wine the region puts its name to, dark and high in acid and built for the heavy food up the hill.
He asks her one thing, how long it sits in wood, and she answers, and he asks nothing after that.
The silence does its usual work. She fills it on her own, past the wine and into the part she actually cares about: the soil, the iron in it that drives the red so deep, the rows her grandfather set.
He watches her hands the whole time. Hands give him more than faces do.
Hers are blunt and certain and never quite still.
He has interviewed enough producers to know the two kinds.
There are the ones who recite, who have a version ready, polished smooth by the tour groups and the regional council and the back of the label.
And there are the ones like her, who have never once had to explain themselves and so explain badly, in the wrong order, starting in the middle, contradicting a thing they said a minute earlier, which is how he knows it is true.
He does not correct her. He does not steer.
A magazine would want him to steer, to come away with the clean quote and the number of hectares.
He is not writing for a magazine. He lets her go where she goes and keeps the through-line in his head, where it will still be there tonight and next week: the iron in the soil, the iron in her hands, the rust-dark in the glass, all of it one idea she has not bothered to finish.
Then the brandy. She made it almost by accident, she says, a few years back, out of fruit that would have rotted otherwise, and now it is the thing she is proudest of and the thing she keeps off the list. The barrels run the length of the far wall, a number chalked on each head in a hand that is hers.
She stops at the third. She draws a measure straight from the wood into a glass that has seen better decades.
He lifts it to the bulb, the signet on his right hand clicking once against it, and looks: amber, more gold in it than the nose had led him to expect. He drinks.
Dry. Drier than the smell promised. The fruit arrives and then leaves, and what stays is long and warm and just bitter at the close, a finish that goes on working after he has stopped attending to it. He tells her so, plainly, and she nods as though he has passed some small test she sets everyone.
She knocks the bung back into the barrel and tells him the part people never believe: that you cannot hurry it, that you make the thing and then you wait, that the wood does the work and the most you can do is keep out of its way.
She says it flat, a sentence she has put to a hundred people who came for the Teran.
Luca stands in the cold with the empty glass in his hand and thinks of Matej.
Just the fact of him. A man in a room off his own kitchen, a fresh wheel in the brine, who told him on the second day, without making anything of it, that most of the work is leaving the thing alone.
The same sentence out of two mouths that were never in the same room, in two trades.
He lets it go and asks her about the fruit instead.
The visit ends as they all end, with her deciding what he leaves with.
She will not take his money. She presses a bottle on him in its place, not the Teran, the Cabernet, the one she says she does not bother opening for people who come for the Teran.
And while he is still saying he can’t, that it is too much, she is already at the bench wrapping a length of speck in paper, cut from a side she keeps back for the house.
He is, when it comes to it, a man who drives out to people’s homes and leaves with their things.
A bottle today, a wrap of speck, the better part of an hour of a woman who was glad to be asked.
He takes both. He could leave the speck.
He doesn’t. He thanks her and climbs the worn stone back up into the afternoon, and the parcel stays warm through the paper against his arm the whole drive home.
Matej
He hears the car before he sees the headlights.
He is at the stove, nothing complicated, lentils, and he hears it without moving. The engine note. He has known it for four days now, which is not very long.
Luca comes in with his boots muddy and a bottle under one arm and something wrapped in paper in his other hand. He sets both on the table without asking. Unwraps the paper: a length of home-cured speck, dark and close-grained, the kind that comes from someone’s cellar not a shop.
“The woman at the ?toka estate,” Luca says. “She wouldn’t let me leave without it.”
Matej looks at the speck. Then at the bottle — not the Teran, the Cabernet Sauvignon, the one they don’t lead with. “She took you into the cellar.”
“She did. Showed me the brandy too.”
Matej nods. Some of them are doing that. “And?”
“She knows what she’s doing.”
“Then you earned it.”
“There used to be one here that made something serious. Old operation. Nobody knows much about it anymore.” He turns back to the stove. Cuts the heat. Gets the board.
Luca almost smiles. Sets his jacket over the chair — the chair, already, like it has always been his — and sits down.
Luca
The kitchen smells of lentils and vinegar and woodsmoke and something underneath that he has stopped trying to identify.
He watches Matej move — stove to counter to board, efficient, no wasted motion — and thinks about his flat in Milan.
A kitchen that performs: granite, good knives, the full grammar of a correctly assembled life.
A showroom. Nobody in it. Most nights he eats standing at the counter with the radio on so the room isn’t quiet.
He doesn’t know why he’s thinking about this.
Matej puts the board down. Cheese, bread, the speck sliced thin. Sits across from him. Pours without asking how much.
Outside something settles against the shutters — a low, steady pressure, like the house is being held.
“Good day?” Matej says, while the wine breathes.
“Yes,” Luca says. And then, because it’s true: “Good day.”
“Long day?”
“She had everything down there. I stood at the Teran for a while.” He looks at the glass. “Then I didn’t.”
“The brandy?”
“Dry. Long finish. She let me taste it from the barrel.” He sets the glass down. “I’ll write about it someday.”
He means it, he thinks. And then: the ?toka woman has been making brandy for a few years.
She has something to show for it. Barrels, a method, a thing she built.
He has articles. Good ones. Pieces that appeared and were read and are somewhere now in an archive nobody opens.
He picks up the cheese Matej made and eats it and does not finish the thought.
Matej nods. Eats. Says nothing more.
Luca takes a sip. There it is — dark fruit, something close to chocolate, a weight that settles rather than announces itself.
In Milan right now someone is ordering aperitivo and someone else is double-parked on Via Torino and his phone has seventeen unread messages and none of them are urgent and none of them are this.
He picks up his glass again.
He thinks: I should check my phone.
He doesn’t.