Chapter 26 #2
The yard is as it was. He is met without ceremony, the sleeves already pushed back, a nod that takes in the box on his hip and understands it before he has said anything.
The cheese is taken, turned once, set down on the long table inside as though it has a place already assigned.
Nothing is made of it. He has learned to read the nothing.
There is no tasting. That was the first visit, the glasses in order, the cellar tour, the careful sequence by which a stranger is shown the thing and decides what to write.
This is lunch. The table fills as these tables fill, without anyone seeming to carry the food to it: bread still warm in the cloth, salami cut from a length someone made and hung and forgot about until now, vegetables put up in oil last autumn and brought up from the cold.
And the cheese, Matej’s cheese, set down among the rest as if it had grown there.
He eats. Nobody watches him do it, nobody waits to see what he makes of the salami, and he reaches across for the bread without being passed it and registers, a beat later, that this is the difference.
The first time he had been served. This time he is just at the table.
The wine that comes to the table is not made anything of, poured before he can say yes or no to it, the bottle already open from the kitchen.
He drinks it slowly. It is very good. He thinks, without wanting to, that Matej will work through a case of the other one, the red they sell by the box, without ever once saying that he likes it.
After, before the boxes go out to the car, they take him down.
He had thought he had seen the cellar. He had seen a cellar.
This is deeper, a chamber cut straight into the living rock, the walls weeping faintly, the cold coming up through the soles of his shoes the moment he is below ground.
The temperature does not change down here from January to August. He knows this as he now knows a great many things about stone, which is to say through Matej, through the cave, through the long education of these past weeks.
The rock keeps its own counsel. You build inside it and it does the rest.
And there, set apart, is the barrel made of stone.
Not staved, not oak, not the chalk-numbered wood of the brandy he had tasted the first time.
One block of pale Karst limestone, hollowed by a hand that decided the wine that grows out of this rock should rest inside it as well, and went and cut a cask from a single stone to prove it.
He stands in front of it longer than is polite.
The white grape sleeps inside, the old native one, the one almost nobody plants.
He is given to understand that it rests in there and is not hurried.
He does not write this down. He has stopped needing to write down the things that matter most; those stay.
What stays now is not the fact of the barrel but what the barrel is telling him, which is something he has been circling for three weeks at the kitchen table and has not let himself say in a full sentence.
That a person can take the thing a place already makes and decide to make it differently.
That nobody asked for a cask cut from one stone and somebody cut it anyway, and the wine is better for it, or is at least theirs for it, which may be the same thing.
You are allowed to put your hands in the old work.
He thinks of a copper coil in a sealed room not far from here, and a recipe in two languages, and the bottle on Matej’s shelf that no longer frightens him quite as much as it did.
The thought arrives whole and then he lets it go, as Matej lets the cheese alone, because it is not ready and pressing on it now would only mark it.
But it is firmer than it was this morning. The stone barrel has done that.
Back up in the light he is the Italian again, and the Italian had arrived not so long ago with a map of where serious things were made, and the map had stopped at a border.
He knows better now. He had not expected the sparkling wine, the proper kind, the second fermentation gone slow in the bottle in caves not unlike the one he sleeps above.
He had not expected any of it to be taken this seriously this far east of the line he was raised to think the seriousness ended at.
Older than the Romans, they say here, about the vines, the way people say things they have always said, and he does not put it in the book as a fact because he cannot prove it.
He puts down something truer instead, that evening, over the open document: that the line his family wine had stopped at was never a line the ground agreed to.
The boxes go in the back of the car, two of them, twelve bottles, more than he can reasonably drink and exactly as much as he was told to bring. He is sent off with bread he did not ask for and the firm sense of having been entered, finally, into the account on the right side of the ledger.
He drives back along the road he came in on, the cheese gone, the wine where the cheese had been, the plateau going gold at the edges.
The book is already moving; he started it days ago, with the stone.
What he has now is not the opening but the thing the opening was missing, which he could not have written this morning and can write tonight.