Bruno 02 - The Dark Vineyard

place?”

18
    The party was still under way at Joe’s place when Bruno and Isabelle arrived that evening. Their hair was still damp from the shower, their desire for each other slaked but hardly sated. Joe’s favorite 1930s
bal musette
music was blaring from the speakers, and a throng of bare-legged people stood around the outbuildings at the bottom of the yard. Around them scampered the hens from Joe’s chicken coop, pecking at the ground between the feet of the revelers and fluttering fussily out of the path of the humans.
    Montsouris sat with Karim and his wife, Rashida, from the roadside café at the entrance to Saint-Denis, tickling their new baby under the chin. In swimming trunks and a T-shirt, and with a big smile on his face as he played with Karim’s new son, Montsouris could not have looked less like the fiery trade union militant he liked to play at the council table. Stéphane, his vast thighs like tree trunks, had one arm fondly around his wife, and his other hand gripped a large tumbler of wine. Brosseil, the town notary, was locked in conversation with Gérard, owner of the local campgrounds, his white and spindly legs looking as if it was their first time in the open air this year. Rollo, headmaster of the local
collège
, was pouring more wine.
    A cheer went up as Bruno and Isabelle joined them, hand in hand, a languid, almost dreamy look on their faces that signaled the way they had spent the afternoon and raised knowing smiles from his friends. Bruno bent down to take off his boots, socks and trousers and took his place in line at the tap to sluice off his legs. Like most of the men coming for this annual ceremony of treading Joe’s grapes, he wore swimming trunks beneath his pants, and with his T-shirt he was dressed as if for a game of tennis. But the familiar sight of his bare legs sent the women into bursts of bawdy laughter.
    “Ooh, there’s a hairy one,” hooted Monique, who worked at the town swimming pool and spent her life with half-naked men, and she pirouetted before a bunch of giggling friends, her skirts tucked up into her waistband to reveal her tanned and brawny legs.
    “That’s why he’s Bruno, Bruno the hairy bear,” called out Montsouris’s wife, arm in arm with Josette from the flower shop. “You two just control yourselves in there—if you’ve got any energy left, that is.”
    Isabelle, slipping off her shoes and sliding her jeans down her shapely legs to reveal the sleek swimsuit she had donned in Bruno’s bedroom, was laughing openly as she joined Bruno at the faucet. “These women are terrific,” she said, putting her arm on his shoulder and turning to watch them.
    There was something about the day’s events that turned the usually staid women of Saint-Denis into so many jolly wenches, hooting with derision at the legs of each other’s husbands, making saucy jokes about the young men and flaunting their bare thighs as they paraded up and down, singing along to Joe’s old songs after their turn in the vat. It was the kind of evening that made Bruno aware that he was a bachelor, for the husbands seemed entirely pleased with the liveliness and the raucous sisterhood of their wives, as if the woman they knew inprivate was treating herself to a rare public appearance. The single men by contrast seemed startled, even a little shy, at seeing the worthy women they knew from the shops and markets, weddings and funerals acting so out of character.
    Bruno relished this event each year. If the men of Saint-Denis could let their hair down at the rugby club and the hunting dinners, their womenfolk deserved a similar license. Bruno smiled to himself, remembering Cresseil’s remark about the number of children born nine months after the harvest. Probably the reason the married men were all grinning at their wives’ performance was that they took the bawdy mood home with them. He exchanged glances with Isabelle, twining his fingers into hers. “We won’t stay long,” he murmured.
    “Come on out of that vat, Jacquot,” Josette shouted to her husband through the doorway. “I don’t want you tiring yourself out in there. Save something for later.” The women around her collapsed into happy hysterics. Scenes like this had probably gone on in these parts for centuries, thought Bruno, soon distracted by a number of slaps on his rump as he squeezed through the women to take his place in the vat after Jacquot.
    The sweet scent of the grape juice was heady, somehow