Below the Vineyard

Our family has a house near the mountains. Over a century old, built with stone, wood and adobe. It has been very well kept and modern commodities, like tap water and electricity, had been gradually added to the ancient one-floor building. On the front yard we keep a vegetable garden and a chicken coop and on the back of the house there is a trail that leads to the family vineyard. It is relatively small, but most years it bears enough grape to make about a dozen bottles of wine. Up until now mom and me stayed at our flat in town during the week and visited grandpa each weekend. We were a small family, but a reasonably happy one. I never knew my father and my grandmother died a year before I was born, but I always felt well loved.

Sadly, grandpa died just a few days before my fifteenth birthday. He was in very good shape but one otherwise normal Tuesday morning he fell from the roof while trying to patch a hole. Since the house is reasonably far from town and grandpa didn’t have a mobile phone to call for help, it took days for someone to discover his body. Mom came to school to pick me up in the middle of Math class on Wednesday, as soon as she learned about grandpa’s death. She was clearly stressed but didn’t seem particularly sad. Grandpa’s body had already been picked up and taken to the mortuary, she explained. Mom made me wait in the car while she made the preparations for the cremation.

Only two days later mom had very efficiently managed to sort most of the legal paperwork and organised the cremation and the funeral. Then, when the ceremonies were over, mom drove us back to our old home while I carried the urn with grandpa’s ashes. She prepared dinner and we silently ate the Spanish omelette, shared some of our memories about the missing member of our small family and went to bed early. She was acting with unbelievable stoicism, so I tried to do the same. However, I wasn’t so strong, so I was still awake and crying near midnight when I heard mom getting out of her room and leave the house through the back door. Back then I thought she probably needed some time alone.

The next day she let me sleep until late and we had a quite bountiful breakfast with fresh orange juice, French toast, jam, fruit and cheese. Then she took me back to town and I stayed a few days with an old couple, close friends of the family, while she took care of other businesses. She came back to pick me up on Tuesday, after school, and we returned to our usual routine, except for two things: grandpa wasn’t waiting for us in the old house and during our weekends mother often visited the vineyard after midnight. One evening I, accidentally, found out that gramp’s ashes were missing but when I asked mom she told me that it was ok, that I shouldn’t worry. I trusted her, so I didn’t worry and soon forgot about the issue.

When six months had passed since grandpa’s’ death, one Saturday night mom woke me up just before midnight. She was holding a bottle of the previous year’s wine on one hand and a lantern on the other. She handed me the light, told me to put something on and led me out of the house through the back door.

“You are old enough to know now,” she said, walking off the trail and taking a different route that went around our patch of land. “I think.”

I followed her silently, despite the thousands of questions I had for her. There was an air of solemnity and mystery about what we were doing and I felt that waiting was the right thing to do.

We soon arrived to the opening of a natural cave, exceptionally well hidden behind a group of blackthorn bushes. We crawled on all fours to avoid the prickly branches of the plants and entered the grotto. It was tall enough for us to walk upright but just wide enough for a person to pass through. There were marks on the walls that suggested that it had been broadened a long time ago using some kind of pick or spade. After about five minutes we reached a dead end, a surprisingly big instance filled with a web of thousands of roots that came down from the ceiling, that was almost ten feet above our heads. Most of the vines coalesced at the end of the room, entwining together into a dense net shaped like a massive pillar. My mother uncorked the wine bottle with a popping sound and walked towards the wooden structure.

“Come here,” she said, pouring the dark red liquid into an opening between the criss-crossed vines. “Your grandfather always loved his wine,” she added off-handedly.

I slowly walked towards her, suddenly feeling a wave of uneasiness, while beads of cold sweat started to fill my brow.

“I was afraid that only his ashes wouldn’t be enough,” she continued, drinking the last bit of wine from the bottom of the bottle. “But obviously they were.”

I kicked something round and not very heavy. It sounded unnervingly hollow and bony as it rolled over the uneven floor. I refused to point the light towards it or look down.

“You are too young to have twins,” mom continued, which to me sounded like crazy talk, “but I know you are prepared to help me raise them,” she finished, softly touching a rounded shape that rested in the middle of the net of roots, perfectly protected.

I tried to swallow, but my mouth and throat were completely dry. I almost couldn’t breathe, but I needed to know. I pushed my mother apart and pointed the light towards the mysterious sphere. It was a grape, or it seemed to be a grape. A huge and almost perfectly round dark grape. Like the ones we grew in the family vineyard above the cave, but this was at least the size of a basketball and something seemed to be moving inside. My mother gently put her hand on my shoulder. If she said anything to calm me down, I didn’t hear it. All I could hear was my own heartbeat pounding through my body, echoing in my ears.

Dizzy and lightheaded, I pressed the lens of the lantern against the skin of the bizarre fruit. The light barely could pass through the dense, veiny looking interior. Inside its amethyst gelatinous flesh, the silhouettes of two small fetuses seemed to grow from a central stem to which they were joined by their umbilical cords. One of the blind unfinished creatures was twitching, unconsciously kicking inside its pulpy womb. The sudden realisation of what the terrible revelation suggested immediately demolished what little was left of my poise. The last thing I heard before fainting was a simple, short and completely mundane sentence uttered by what I had always believed to be my mother.

“It will be a good year.”