Bordoni

Bordoni is the Swiss-Italian rancher who sells Adam Trask the core of the old Sanchez grant, the nine-hundred-acre property that becomes the Trask ranch. A childless widower, he embodies the end of one era and the beginning of another: the Spanish land grant, reduced from ten thousand acres to its irreducible heart, passes through him to an Eastern newcomer. His unhurried, almost indifferent selling method draws Adam into a purchase that Adam himself does not immediately recognize as inevitable, and his presence marks the moment when the valley's future begins to take shape around the Trask family.

Identity and Background

Bordoni is a Swiss immigrant who married the daughter and heiress of a Spanish family that had settled in the Salinas Valley in very early times. The original Sanchez grant had been ten thousand acres, but as happened with most of the old families, the land slipped away—some lost in gambling, some chipped off for taxes, and some acres torn off like coupons to buy luxuries. The nine hundred remaining acres that Bordoni owns are the core of the original grant and the best of it, straddling the river and tucking into the foothills on both sides at the point where the valley narrows and then opens out again. The original Sanchez house, built of adobe with walls four feet thick and round pole rafters tied with rawhide ropes that shrank and pulled joist and rafter tight, still stands on the property. Bordoni, with his national passion for cleanliness, distrusts the thick mud walls and builds a frame house some distance away, using the old adobe as a cow barn where his cows put their heads out the deep recessed windows.

Life and Circumstances

Bordoni is childless, and when his wife dies in ripe years a lonely longing for his Alpine past falls on him. He wants to sell the ranch and go home. He asks a big price and uses the selling method of pretending not to care whether he sells or not. He knows Adam is going to buy his land long before Adam knows it. Every afternoon he gets a little drunk on red wine squeezed from the grapes of his small hillside vineyard, and he pours tumblers of it for Adam, who has never tasted wine before and begins to like it. Adam goes through all the motions of carefulness—driving and riding and walking over every foot of the land, putting a post-hole auger down through the subsoil, examining game tracks in the mud, threading among willows and sycamores and wild blackberry vines—but Bordoni waits, squinting, and eventually Adam shakes his hand and the Sanchez place is his.

Narrative Role and Significance

Bordoni functions as a threshold figure in the novel's geography and history. He is the last holder of the old Spanish grant before it passes to Adam Trask, and his departure for Switzerland closes a chapter of the valley's past. His land, with its ever-running spring of sweet water, its huge live oaks, and its adobe house that seems to have grown out of the earth, becomes the setting for the Trask family's central drama—the birth of the twins, Cathy's desertion, Adam's long withdrawal, and the boys' childhood. The wine that Bordoni shares with Adam becomes a sensory link to the place; Adam later remembers drinking wine there before he bought the place and wonders whether he bought it because of the wine. Bordoni himself disappears from the narrative after the sale, but the land he transfers remains the physical and symbolic ground of the story's most important events.