T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

She was giving him a look, a crease between her eyebrows, hands on hips. “What did you say?”

“I mean”—fumbling after his English—“no, no, thank you… but who, I mean…?”

She was serene — a very model of serenity — though the other customers, men in suits, two boys and their mother lingering over their ice cream, were all watching her and quietly listening for her answer. “I’m Ariadne,” she said. “Ariadne Siagris.” She looked over her shoulder to the black-eyed man standing at the grill. “That’s my uncle.”

Baldasare was charmed — and a bit dazed too. She was beautiful — or at least to his starved eyes she was — and he wanted to say something witty to her, something flirtatious, something that would let her know that he wasn’t just another sorrowful Italian laborer with no more means or expectations than the price of the next hamburger sandwich, but a man of substance, a landowner, future proprietor of the Baldasare Forestiere Vineyards. But he couldn’t think of anything, his mind impacted, his tongue gone dead in the sleeve of his mouth. Then he felt his jaws opening of their own accord and heard himself saying, “Baldasare Forestiere, at your service.”

He would always remember that moment, through all the digging and lifting and wheelbarrowing to come, because she looked hard at him, as if she could see right through to his bones, and then she turned up the corners of her mouth, pressed two fingers to her lips, and giggled.

—

That night, as he lay in his miserable bed in his miserable shack that was little more than a glorified chicken coop, he could think of nothing but her. Ariadne Siagris. She was the one. She was what he’d come to America for, and he spoke her name aloud as the rain beat at his crude roof and insinuated itself through a hundred slivers and cracks to drizzle down onto his already damp blankets, spoke her name aloud and made the solemnest pledge that she would one day be his bride. But it was cold and the night beyond the walls was limitless and black and his teeth were chattering so forcefully he could barely get the words out. He was mad, of course, and he knew it. How could he think to have a chance with her? What could he offer her, a girl like that who’d come all the way from Chicago, Illinois, to live with her uncle, the prosperous Greek — a school-educated girl used to fine things and books? Yes, he’d made inquiries — he’d done nothing but inquire since he’d left the drugstore that afternoon. Her parents were dead, killed at a railway crossing, and she was nineteen years old, with two younger sisters and three brothers, all of them farmed out to relatives. Ariadne. Ariadne Siagris.

The rain was relentless. It spoke and sighed and roared. He was wearing every stitch of clothing he possessed, wrapped in his blankets and huddled over the coal-oil lamp, and still he froze, even here in California. It was an endless night, an insufferable night, but a night in which his mind was set free to roam the universe of his life, one thought piled atop another like bricks in a wall, until at some point, unaccountably, he was thinking of the grand tunnels he’d excavated in New York and Boston, how clean they were, how warm in winter and cool in summer, how they smelled, always, of the richness of the earth. Snow could be falling on the streets above, the gutters frozen, wind cutting into people’s eyes, but below ground there was no weather, none at all. He thought about that, pictured it — the great arching tubes carved out of the earth and the locomotive with a train of cars standing there beneath the ground and all the passengers staring placidly out the windows — and then he was asleep.

The next morning, he began to dig again. The rain had gone and the sun glistened like spilled oil over his seventy acres of mire and hardpan. He told himself he was digging a cellar — a proper cellar for the house he would one day build, because he hadn’t given up, not yet, not Baldasare Forestiere — but even then, even as he spat on his hands and raised the pick above his head, he knew there was more to it than that. The pick rose and fell, the shovel licked at the earth with all the probing intimacy of a tongue, and the wheelbarrow groaned under one load after another. Baldasare was digging. And he was happy, happier than he’d been since the day he stepped down from the train, because he was digging for her, for Ariadne, and because digging was what he’d been born to do.

But then the cellar was finished — a fine deep vaulted space in which he could not only stand erect — at his full height of five feet and four inches — but thrust his right arm straight up over his head and still only just manage to touch the ceiling — and he found himself at a loss for what to do next. He could have squared up the corners and planed the walls with his spade till all the lines were rectilinear, but he didn’t want that. That was the fashion of all the rooms he’d ever lived in, and as he scraped and smoothed and tamped, he realized it didn’t suit him. No, his cellar was dome-shaped, like the apse of the cathedral in which he’d worshipped as a boy, and its entrance was protected from the elements by a long broad ramp replete with gutters that drained into a small reflecting pool just outside the wooden door. And its roof, of course, was of hardpan, impervious to the rain and sun, and more durable than any shingle or tile.

He spent two days smoothing out the slope of the walls and tidying and leveling the floor, working by the light of a coal-oil lantern while in the realm above the sky threw up a tatter of cloud and burned with a sun in the center of it till the next storm rolled in to snuff it out like a candle. When the rain came, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to move his clothes and his bed and his homemade furniture down into the new cellar, which was snug and watertight. Besides, he reasoned, even as he fashioned himself a set of shelves and broke through the hardpan to run a stovepipe out into the circumambient air, what did he need a cellar for — a strict cellar, that is — if he couldn’t grow the onions, apples, potatoes and carrots to store in it?

Once the stove was installed and had baked all the moisture out of the place, he lay on the hard planks of his bed through a long rainy afternoon, smoking one cigarette after another and thinking about what his father had said — about the animals and how they lived in the ground, in holes. His father was a wise man. A man of character and substance. But he wasn’t in California and he wasn’t in love with Ariadne Siagris and he didn’t have to live in a shack the pigeons would have rejected. It took him a while, but the conclusion Baldasare finally reached was that he was no animal — he was just practical, that was all — and he barely surprised himself when he got up from the bed, fetched his shovel and began to chip away at the east wall of his cellar. He could already see a hallway there, a broad grand hallway, straight as a plumb line and as graceful and sensible as the arches the Romans of antiquity put to such good use in their time. And beyond that, as the dirt began to fall and the wheelbarrow shuddered to receive it, he saw a kitchen and bedroom opening onto an atrium, he saw grape and wisteria vines snaking toward the light, camellias, ferns and impatiens overflowing clay pots and baskets — and set firmly in the soil, twenty feet below the surface, an avocado tree, as heavy with fruit as any peddler’s cart.

—

The winter wore on. There wasn’t much hired work this time of year — the grapes had been picked and pressed, the vines cut back, the fig trees pruned, and the winter crops were in the ground. Baldasare had plenty of time on his hands. He wasn’t idle — he just kept right on digging — nor was he destitute. Modest in his needs and frugal by habit, he’d saved practically everything he’d earned through the summer and fall, repairing his own clothes, eating little more than boiled eggs and pasta, using his seventy acres as a place to trap rabbits and songbirds and to gather wood for his stove. His one indulgence was tobacco — that, and a weekly hamburger sandwich at Siagris’ Drugstore.