She did not let go of my hand until we were seated at the table. She picked up the pen again and held it out for me to take. With my heart beating wildly and sweat coating my palm, I took it in my hand. I concentrated on holding it correctly. Caresa shifted my fingers until they were in the correct position. A jolt of surprise ran through me when the pen didn’t slip. When, helped by the rubber casing Caresa had put on, the pen stayed in my hand. It didn’t exactly feel right. But it didn’t exactly feel wrong either.
“Does that help?” she asked cautiously.
I blinked; my vision had suddenly become blurry. “Yes,” I said, moving my wrist, feeling the added grip of the pen between my fingers.
“Good!” Caresa exclaimed. She took the pen from my hand and placed it on the table. Next she placed a piece of paper in front of me. I could see the words written on it.
Caresa inched closer. “Try and read the first word for me.”
I glanced away, hating that the written word made me feel this way. A warm comforting hand covered mine, chasing away some of my nerves. I pulled myself together and turned back to the page. I ran my eyes over the first word. I could see the first letter was a V, but I struggled with the second. Within moments my eyes were straining. I sat back from the table and ran my hand down my face. “I can see the letters, but I don’t understand how the word sounds. I can’t hear it in my head. Without hearing it, I don’t understand it.” I looked at Caresa, who was listening attentively. “Does that make any sense?”
“Completely,” she said. “But we can help with that. We can use the multi-sensory approach.” She edged closer. “People with dyslexia often obtain a greater grasp of the words by using three things.” Caresa lifted her hand, and I swallowed when she touched her index finger to my eyelid. “Seeing the word.” She moved her hand to my mouth, and my blood rushed faster through my veins. “Saying the word aloud.” Finally, she brushed her hand past my ear, and shivers broke out across my skin. “And hearing the word repeated back.”
She drew back her hand and took different colored pens to the page. She ran a red pen over two letters. “We can also color-code the vowels and the letters that give the word its sound. We can help you phonetically. We can help you identify the syllables. You will eventually understand the words by sounding them out in your head.”
“Really?” I asked doubtfully.
Caresa pushed the paper back before me. I ran my eyes over the letters: V I N O. I didn’t quite know what it said, but the different colors helped me make out the different letters.
“Can you decipher the letters?” Caresa asked. I told her what they were, using my finger as a guide on the paper.
Caresa’s responding smile was wide and bright and free. “Achille,” she whispered. “You are not illiterate. You understand letters. You can read letters.”
“I attended school until I was thirteen, before the king suggested I be pulled out.”
Caresa’s face became a mass of confusion. “The king encouraged you to leave school?”
“Yes. The teachers said I needed more help than they could give me—the school wasn’t equipped. It was a small village school. My father asked the king for help as we didn’t have the money to afford specialized treatment on our own. The king sided with some of the teachers who agreed I was just slow. He thought it better that I followed in my father’s footsteps and poured myself into learning the craft of winemaking, especially the merlot. He promised my father that he would get me tutors to help me along as I worked. But it never happened. By the time my father had had enough and demanded the king make good on his promise, too much time had passed.
“If I had gone back into the mainstream school, I would have been two or more years behind, and I just couldn’t bear the thought of that. I fought with my father over it. It was the only time we had ever fought. In the end, he agreed to school me at home. He tried, but in the end, my issues were beyond his grasp. He had a vineyard to run, and time just slipped away. I never knew why the king did what he did. It was as though he wanted me kept out of sight. Eventually, my father and I got used to my lack of academic abilities. I threw myself completely into winemaking, and a few years later I became the head winemaker. At age sixteen I made my very own vintage. I did it all myself; my father simply looked on.”
“2008,” Caresa murmured, that same hint of awe in her voice that she’d had the first day we met.
“Yes. How did you know?”
“That year is historic for the Savona Bella Collina merlot. It is the year the wine became better than ever before. Achille, the 2008 vintage is the most expensive bottle of merlot in the world.”
“It is?” I said in surprise, not daring to believe it was the truth.
“How can you not know this?” she asked in amazement.
“Because that part of the process doesn’t interest me. For me it is about the making and aging of the wine, not the price.”
A loving expression blossomed on Caresa’s face. “I know,” she said quietly. “Then you don’t know that the winner of the International Wine Awards will be announced at three p.m. on the day of Bella Collina’s grape-crushing festival. You may well win again. You have not lost in years.”
“The king has always accepted the acclaim.” I laughed to myself. “I have never even seen the awards. King Santo always kept them to display over in the main estate.”
“Achille, that is awful.” Caresa was appalled, and I didn’t think she even noticed that she had once again put her hand in mine.
“I don’t mind. I don’t like being the center of attention. King Santo was good at it. Prince Zeno will be no different. If we win, he will take the praise and the award. And I’ll be content with knowing that I have produced the best wine possible. I am happy with my quiet life, Caresa. I am not born for balls and parties, crowds and big affairs. In fact, I couldn’t think of anything worse.”
I didn’t mean to upset her. But I knew I had when Caresa turned her head and pointed back to the word on the page.
“Caresa?” I asked, wanting to know what I had done wrong.
She batted her hand in front of her face and threw on a smile. It was fake. I could see it was fake. I wondered if this was the polished face of the Duchessa di Parma I was witnessing.
I decided right then that if it was, I preferred my Caresa.
Caresa’s gaze drifted out of the barn doors, then back to the sheets of paper on the table. “Let’s get on with this. I don’t want you to have to sacrifice too much time with your beloved wine.”
Minutes later, and after a long process of sounding out which letters made which sounds, I smiled. “Vino. The word is vino.”
“The most authentic learning comes when there is a connection between the student and the subject. This way, the words are familiar to you and will therefore help you better understand the rules of spelling and sounds. You are every inch a winemaker, down to your very soul. It made sense to me that we should use these familiar words.”
My chest constricted at just how much thought and energy Caresa had put into this task. A task she got nothing from.
“Thank you,” I said, knowing these two words were inadequate to describe the depth of my gratitude.
Caresa passed me another sheet and the pen from before. Two hours later, I had completed a worksheet where I had to trace out the shape of letters. We had gone through eleven words on the reading sheet, and I was now the proud owner of an iPod.
“It is filled with audio books so at night you can read along with the actual books.” Caresa had brought me a stack of books that she wanted me to try and read a sentence or two from each night. The audio book would read along with me so I could see and hear the words. Afterwards, I would sound them out—eyes, lips and ears. “It has voice control so you can ask for the book rather than have to find it by the written title. I have put them in the same order as the books so you won’t accidentally read the wrong one.”
The iPod, she told me, also had on it every opera and concerto piece that I could imagine. She told me it would be easier to listen to in the fields than the old cassette player.