El refugio de Silvia
A woman conquers fear and doubt to earn a livelihood, and a life, in Napa’s vineyards
I.
You didn’t want to come here in the first place.
You didn’t have a choice. He tricked you: He promised you could finish high school. Otherwise you swore you wouldn’t have married him. You were so close — just a year and a half to go. Your parents would have been so proud, the first in the family to finish. You would have been like your cousins, the engineers. You were going to be a secretary — the executive secretary. You were going to be someone.
“You’re a married woman now,” he said. And suddenly, you were leaving Michoacan.
Napa. His days in the fields were so long. You couldn’t drive a car. You couldn’t speak the language. You stayed inside, mostly. You were 17. One day he said you had to get a job. (He was more unpredictable, had grown more aggressive.) So you spent a few days working in the fields, yanking stubborn leaves off the vines. The whole time you felt like you were on the verge of fainting, it was so unbearably hot. Your fever lasted two weeks. Then you realized: you were pregnant.
What was this life? “The women have to put up with it until death,” your mother had warned. One less dream to accomplish, you thought.
II.
This time, your daughters saw it. His drinking had gotten worse, and the drugs. He took you by the neck one night. You felt sure he was strangling you. Your daughters watched. Melisa screamed. He threw her across the room.
He didn’t know that you were pregnant with Ricardo.
All you wanted was courage. You summoned it in tiny increments. Day by day, little by little, until Ricardo was 3 months old, and that’s when you finally said: I don’t want my son to become like his father. And you took your three children and went south to Michoacan.
When you came back to California six months later, you thought it would be easier. A reset, a do-over. The girls could return to their schools. You would get a job, finally. You would be free. Freer even than in Michoacan, where there were no jobs, no money. Before your return, your mother sewed secret pockets into your clothing: $50 inside the sleeve of your jacket, $50 hiding in your shirt.
It didn’t take him a week to find you. “If you leave me you’ll be nothing,” he told you, even though you had already left him. His eyes had grown crazier. He ripped the money from the sleeve of your jacket. He said he needed you to sell drugs, to help him.
Later, when the lawyer would call and ask you to testify on his behalf, you would say no. And when you heard that they were sending him back to Mexico, that this life in California was now yours, yours alone, you’d brace yourself for a different sort of fear.
III.
“A winery on Mount Veeder needs people for bottling,” the señora told you, “and they pay $9 an hour.”
It was better than the pizzeria’s wage. The Sizzler couldn’t give you enough hours. And the laundromat, after all this time, had never paid you. The señora would drive.
On the bottling line at Chateau Potelle you watched the other women for clues, praying you wouldn’t have to admit you’d never done this before. You were sure it was obvious, but then the winemaker asked you to come back next week. Said they were hiring cellar workers. Did you know how to drive a forklift? How to do pumpovers? How to move barrels? You were honest: No. When the winemaker taught you, you didn’t understand a word he said. But you watched, and you nodded. And you asked for a raise to $9.50.
A system: The Sizzler pays the utility bills. Chateau Potelle pays the rent. And we eat rice and beans.
One day you heard the wine distributor say he was selling his old car. You had seen it: a little red Acura. You decided on the spot, before someone else could claim it. “Silvia, are you sure?” they all asked, and gave you that look like they thought you were crazy. “But it’s a stick shift,” they said. You shrugged: manual or automatic, it was all new to you.
$2,500 for the car, and the winemaker’s nephew spent the next two Saturdays teaching you how to drive.
IV.
Did anything last forever? Another company had bought Chateau Potelle. And just like that, your job was gone.
You brought Ricardo in the car when you went to Lewis Cellars. He made you repeat after him: Hello, my name is Silvia Ortiz, and
I would like a job. Your 6-year-old son, your coach. During the interview, you kept going back to the car: Ricardo, how do I say “11 dollars an hour” in English? How do I say “I will work for a week, a day, an hour?”
“Who’s in the car?” the man finally asked. And you brought Ricardo inside to translate. You couldn’t tell if he thought it was cute or annoying.
No is all you remember of that first harvest at Lewis. No, you can’t drive the forklift. No, you can’t fill barrels. You protested: But I know how!
Every day you were sure it was going to be your last, that they would no longer need you. You never expected to hear those words you heard, finally, in the winemaker’s office after harvest was over: permanent employee.
V.
These days, sometimes, you just want to be alone with the wine.
After 10 years with Lewis, muscle memory kicks in. Harvest is a blur of frenetic motion: The tilting 2-ton bins of grapes. The trembling belt of the sorting table. The stream of juice bulging and pulsing through the pump. The mad, ecstatic pumpover: spraying, subsuming, with the urgency of a firehose.
That’s when you seek out a lull — fermentation. You have to get it just right. Too hot, and the yeast will die. Too cold, and they won’t reproduce. You coax them awake, baiting them with sugar. Whispering, “eat.” Waiting. Checking the temperature. Have they eaten the sugar? Adding a pinch. Heating. Breathing. Waiting.
“Silvia, you’re talking to the yeast,” Josh says.
It seems so obvious to you: “But they’re living beings.”
You never knew mastery like this. Chemistry. Biology. “What do you think?” Josh asks, handing you a wine glass. You tell him the flavor is good. You tell him in English, ever since he started sending you to English classes at Napa College.
Your children like to tease you. “You love wine more than us!” What they’re really saying is: We can tell that you feel you are good at this. They know, for themselves, that they are entitled to that feeling. Ricardo, always with his camera around his neck. Melisa, the equestrian. Elizabeth, saying she wants to be a teacher. It seems too good to be true, that they didn’t inherit your fear.
You wait for the yeast, patiently, and it occurs to you: What will you do when they all leave you? Will you ever go back to school? Will you stay in California?
The yeast begin to bubble. “Eat,” you tell them again. Waking up. Warming up. Waiting.
All you wanted was courage. You summoned it in tiny increments. Day by day, little by little, until Ricardo was 3 months old, and that’s when you finally said: I don’t want my son to become like his father.