The Rendezvous and Other Stories by Patrick O'Brian

Author:Patrick O'Brian
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

The Chian Wine

WHEN FIRST HE CAME TO Saint-Felíu the middle and indeed the dark ages still hung about the streets, while the beach was classical antiquity itself. The village was so heavily fortified, with two castles, five towers and a massive surrounding wall – so heavily fortified against the Spaniards, the Algerine corsairs and the inhuman people from the neighbouring province that there was little room for the three thousand inhabitants. In the course of centuries they had crammed their houses into narrow winding lanes, so close that their roofs, viewed from the nearby hills, resembled a swarm of bees, with never an open place to be seen.

Hanging from his window over one of these deep lanes in the hope of air – he had been ordered to the Mediterranean for the air – Alphard saw a world he had imagined long past and gone: in those days mules paced by; women with loads poised on their heads – heads that turned slowly, with infinite grace, to watch the town-crier as he beat his drum and announced death or the arrival of goat-cheese in the market-place. Tumblers appeared, a family of dumb acrobats; they spread a dusty mat on the cobbles and tumbled there in the street, turning somersaults and contorting their lithe dusty bodies until it seemed they must come apart, while their dumb, thin-faced children looked up with open hands to the windows, catching the sparse shower of little coins: and at All Hallows a Basque brought his dancing bear – they slept together, by arrangement, in the cellar of Alphard’s house. The life of the village went on in the street. At noon the men lit fires of vine-cuttings outside their doors, and the smell of grilling fish wafted up; family quarrels also came out into the open, and once he saw a stone-faced woman bring a chair and sit outside a door all day and half the night until her husband should come out. Every morning the women carried pots of filth mixed with ashes to the edge of the sea; every morning they and their daughters went to the pump recessed into the opposite house for water; every evening the grandmothers came back from the hills loaded with an immense faggot, held by a band across their foreheads. Every evening the ass that belonged to Alphard’s landlord picked its way through the people, through the innumerable dogs and cats, and walked up the ladder-like stairs, followed some minutes later by its master, a man with a fair-sized vineyard and a market-garden, and one of the few who did not go out with the fishing-boats. The fishermen all had vineyards too in the terraced hills behind; and as peasants they lived by the rhythm of the sun for half the year, rising before dawn and sleeping in the heat of the day; in the due seasons they worked, sprayed, sulphured and pruned their vines, and every autumn, when the grapes came home in narrow carts or

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