The Republic of Wine

from cracks between rocks and swarmed over the buffalo’s corpse. My mother-in-law tried to drive them away, but they jumped half a meter high, and turned their attack to my mother-in-law, who was just a little girl at the time. As the rats began clawing at her chest, she ran screaming into the cave.
    Crying out for her father and uncles, she threaded her way through the darkness. Suddenly the cave lit up in front of her and seven blazing torches appeared above her head. My mother-in-law said that her father fashioned torches out of treetops soaked in resin during the off season. The torches were about a meter long, with a thin handle that could be held in the mouth. My mother-in-law said she stopped crying as soon as she saw the light from the torches, for a sacred and grave force clutched her throat. Compared to the work her father and uncles were engaged in, her petty fears weren’t worth mentioning.
    It was a gigantic cave, about sixty meters high and eighty meters wide, but these estimates of size came from my mother-in-law’s adult assessment of a childhood memory. Exactly how long the cave was, she couldn’t say. There were sounds of water flowing in the cave and dripping from the ceiling; a cool breeze blew. She looked up at the torches burning above her; the flames were reflected on her father’s and uncles’ faces, particularly her handsome, youngest uncle, whose skin had turned amber. His face even had the texture of amber; it was a moving, unforgettable sight, like the champagne called Italian Widow Wine, which is refreshing and rich, with a wonderful aftertaste that surpasses all others. Holding a crackling torch in his mouth and pressing his body against an indentation in the rocky cliff, he stretched his knife toward a sparkling, creamy-white object - a swallow’s nest.
    My mother-in-law said that what first caught her attention when she entered the cave wasn’t the resin torches above her head, or her young uncle’s handsome face lit up in the flame, but the flocks of swallows flying all over the cave. Startled by the fires, they came flying out of their nests, but were unwilling to stray too far from them. The flapping wings in the cave were like brilliant flowers on mountain slopes, like swarms of circling butterflies. Their chirping sounds filled the cave, as if they were weeping blood and crying blood. My mother-in-law said she could hear the bitterness and anger in their voices. Her father, perched atop tall green bamboo stalks high above her head, reached the other side of the cave, where over a dozen nests had crystallized. With a strip of white cloth wrapped around his head, her father lifted up his face, his dark black nostrils flaring, looking like a roasted piglet. He reached out with a white-handled knife and, with a single stroke, cut down a nest, which he caught in the air and placed into the sack with a forked opening that hung at his waist. Several little black things fell off and landed at my mother-in-law’s feet with a light pop. Bending down and feeling around with her hand, she picked up pieces of broken eggshell with yolk and egg white clinging to them. My mother-in-law said she was deeply saddened. She also felt terrible watching her father risk his life to gather swallows’ nests dozens of meters above the ground, supported by only a few rickety stalks of green bamboo. Swarms of swallows rushed toward the torch in her father’s mouth, as if trying to put out the fire to protect their nests and their offspring; but they were always forced back at the last minute by the heat. Their wings quickly veered off just as they were about to be singed by the flames; blue feathers flickered in the light of the fire. My mother-in-law said her father paid no attention to the harassing swallows. Even when their wings slapped against his head, his eyes were still trained on the nests stuck to the cliff; one by one he scraped them off with steady, accurate, determined skill.
    My mother-in-law said her father and uncles slid down from the bamboo stalks leaning against the cliff when their torches were about to burn out. They gathered together and lit up another batch of torches, while they emptied the nests in their bags and stacked them on a sheet of white cloth. She said that the usual arrangement was that her father only gathered nests for the duration of a single torch. His younger brothers continued working for the duration of three more torches, while he stayed down to guard