Chapter 1
This is my very first novel, and it happens to be my own autobiography in a manner of speaking, I hope the title I've selected will make things a little easier for all of you. You see, there actually was and is a Passion's Vineyard, and it happens to be the one I inherited from my father. And what happened in, around, and about it goes to make up this story.
My name is Carl Venturi, and my dad was born in Cremona, the home of the great Antonio Stradivari, who, as some of you may know, made such wonderful violins that they cost a fortune and are very rare, and are usually played only by the greatest concert artists. But my father, while he liked music well enough, liked his vino much more, and that's why when he inherited a few acres of fertile land near Cremona, he began planting grapes. He wanted a harvest of magnificent, juicy grapes that would produce incomparable wine. To my father, whose name was Marcantonio Venturi, wine, not bread, was the staff of life. There were a few good reasons for his feeling that way about it. Wine, in his opinion, made a man happy and philosophical and emotional. Wine made his staff grow hard as a rock and ready for a good romp in the hay into the soft and willing pussy of a brownskinned, flashing-eyed farmer's daughter whose loins would cradle a man and drain out of him the very juice of life itself. This juice he would replenish, to be sure, by drinking more wine, and so the wonderful cycle would go on. My father, as you can guess, was something of a character.
When he was about twenty-nine, and had been working his land for about five years, he managed to produce by means of grafting one cutting onto another vine a particularly juicy white grape from which could be gleaned a wonderfully robust and yet flowery white wine not unlike Orvieto or Soave, which ranked as Italy's two greatest white wines. Red wine was easily enough yielded, and any fool could grow it, according to my father. It was, to be sure, the staple commodity of a good vineyard, but your real profit and your prestige therefore came from a genuinely great white wine.
So my father came to California, as do all good Italians, Sicilians and Armenians in due course, in their quest for rich soil and the warm sun and enough rain or piped-in water to fertilize the soil and to make it thrive. At first he rented a few acres of land from a wealthy farmer who was really an amateur and who traveled a good deal in Europe screwing one female after another since he was rich and a bachelor, two incomparable qualities necessary to the full enjoyment of pussy. My father used to say that a bachelor was like a vintner, because he could experiment with many kinds of grapes and find the sweetest juices that would delight his palate, whereas the married man has to suffice himself with one grape alone, and if the juice be sour, alas for his prick's happiness.
Be that as it may, my father prospered as a tenant farmer-vintner, and when his wealthy patron returned from Europe as the beaming and portly bridegroom and consort of a voluptuous nineteen-year-old girl from Naples to whom he had taken a fancy and whose mother had been shrewd enough to tell her daughter not to open her legs until there was a wedding ring at the end of the line, the old fool decided to sell my father this good land.
Two years later, when my father was about thirty-two, he produced his first really good crop. The late September harvest was a bountiful one for Marcantonio Venturi. He had an old overseer named Jacopo Lasparri, who had worked in the Valley for over thirty years and who knew grapes better than most men know the capabilities of their own pricks. He had created a label which he proudly called "Venturi Vino," and at first cautiously he had made a very excellent Burgundy and then had attempted a white Sauterne. They were small bottlings, but they sold very well in San Francisco and Los Angeles. The strange thing about Fresno is that while it is an area extremely productive of good wine, few of the natives drink it. I suppose it's like working in a candy shop and not caring to eat the candy that's all around you. But for whatever reasons, the sales of my father's first bottlings were very encouraging.
With the money he got, he went to the bank and borrowed still more. In those happy days, the Bank of America still remembered the principles of its great founder, who had been an Italian himself and who had believed that the wealth of any country comes from the encouragement of the humble people, the farmers and the workers who till the soil and who build and who do things with their own hands. So the great Bank smiled upon my father's endeavors, and gave him more money, and he bought more land.
And when he was forty, the name of "Venturi Vino" was known throughout the State of California, though he had not yet begun to have his bottlings shipped beyond the Rockies. He was almost an illiterate man, was my father, but the salt of the earth and robust and over six feet tall, with a flowing beard and a strong hawklike nose and flashing dark eyes, and he could still at the age of forty do a day's work in the vineyard that would put a man half his age to shame.
At forty he decided it was time he took a wife. Now mind you, my father had not remained continent or virgin through these forty years. That would be to belie his entire philosophy of life. No, at each harvest time, my father had carried on the ancient Italian custom of winetreading. It's a very simple and delightful custom. You take some wooden vats, you put grapes into them, and you let pretty young girls get into the vats wearing short skirts (or if they insist upon wearing long ones, hoisting them above their waists), and you let them trample the grapes while they move about, smiling at the spectators, showing their sun-bronzed thighs and maybe, if they aren't wearing panties, the tempting dark triangle which heralds another place where a man can find the wine of life. And the girl who treads the most grapes and produces the most wine from her trampling with her dainty bare feet wins a prize. Well, the prize was some money and it was also a seance in my father's bedroom. And since my father was a robust and virile stallion, I can tell you that almost all the girls who worked in his vineyard looked his way whenever he passed down the rows where they were picking grapes or pruning the wines and hoped that he would summon them to his bedchamber long before the harvest festival. And to be sure, he usually did.
But as I say, at forty, with money in the bank, a good vineyard of some five hundred acres, a fair reputation for his honorable name stamped on the label which identified a tall bottle of good wine, my father believed it was time to start a family. He therefore sent back to Cremona for the prettiest maiden. Her name was Rosa Bonaventura, which means "good adventure." For her it was one indeed. Her family was enchanted to think that their only daughter would go to fabulously rich America and live like a queen. And she didn't do badly at that. My father had a ranch-type house out where the Fig Garden now is, a huge yard in which he grew gourds and acacia trees and about twelve different kinds of fruit trees including apricots, pears, figs, oranges and apples and grapefruit, and he had an old Model T Ford which he had preserved year after year. When he drove into Fresno's business district with that chugging antique, everyone knew that Marcantonio Venturi had come to town to put more money in the bank.
So Rosa and my father got married, and exactly nine months to the day from their wedding night I came lustily bawling into this world, got smacked on my bottom, was pronounced a boy, and my father handed out cigars and bottles of his best white wine.
I won't bore you with the details of my youth, but I have to tell you something about the quarrel which estranged my father and me and took me away from Fresno for about five years.
First of all, my father was a very domineering man and he wouldn't listen to any arguments. He was right and there were no two ways about it. And since my poor mother, rest her soul, tried all she could but couldn't have any more kids after me, my father had to put up with what nature had given him. Sometimes he thought he had got a helluva of a bargain, and he always let me know about it. His favorite way of letting me know about it was using his razor strap, and I had to drop my pants, put my hands on my hips, and bend over and let him whale away at my naked rump. When I was seventeen, I got mad and turned around and pulled the razor strap out of his hand and hit him on the jaw. He burst into laughter, hugged me and said that I was a true son of his loins and that he would never whip me again.
But that didn't keep him from giving me hell whenever I got out of line. I was almost kicked out of college because I was pussy-conscious too, and the dean of men caught a pretty little Greek girl and myself screwing on his doorstep at about four in the morning. It took a lot of tall talking from my father and a special donation to build a new swimming pool to keep me from having my name expunged from the roster of students.
What bothered my father most, however, was that I didn't really care very much for the good life in the vineyard. I'd gone through college and taken a business administration major, and then I'd looked around in Fresno for a job with some department store or real estate firm where my savvy, enthusiasm and youth would come in handy.
Fresno is a funny kind of town. It's had a lot of great people, but they don't live there anymore, like William Saroyan. It's near Los Angeles and it's near San Francisco, and everybody who lives in Fresno always tells you that it's so handy if you want to go for an exciting weekend to the big city. But there isn't much excitement in Fresno itself. Ifs a lazy town, it's frightfully hot in summer, particularly since they've built an artificial lake and an artificial dam which brought about humidity to what was already scorching dry heat, and it's in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley. It has one newspaper, a couple of radio and television stations, and it frowns on non-conformists. If you're a poor non-conformist, you're dead in Fresno. The only reason my father wasn't dead was because he had a substantial bank account, owned land, and besides he didn't give a damn what people thought about him. Now I felt the same way, but when it came to getting a job, just about every door was closed to me. I was a second-generation Italian, I was the son of a winemaker whose morals had been frowned at by the bluenoses when they had found out about his harvest-time fucking frolics and the pretty girls with bare thighs trampling down grapes in the vats. So I fretted and chafed under the lack of opportunities and the snobbery I ran into, and I think that's what really had got under my skin enough to row with my father so that he finally told me to get the hell out of town and never darken his door again.