Chapter Two
Milan. Now.
The plaster is talking to me and I am the only person on this scaffolding who speaks the language.
Cement. In a building that has been breathing lime for four hundred years.
“Cattivo,” I say.
Marco, my site foreman, is halfway up the ladder with a coffee he is absolutely not supposed to bring up here. “Bad how?”
“Bad like a man who fixes a broken arm by nailing it to a plank.” I open my eyes.
The fresco above me is a sky. Whoever painted it in 1604 could not paint hands, so he put every figure in the composition holding something, a lyre, a bowl, a dog, and I have loved him for six years for that particular cowardice.
“It cannot sweat. So it has been rotting behind the patch since before either of our grandmothers were born.”
“How deep?”
“Deep.” I take the coffee out of his hand, because he was going to spill it, and because it is mine now. “We open it Thursday.”
“Thursday is the tile delivery.”
“Then Thursday will be busy.”
Marco says something under his breath about Norwegians.
He has been saying things under his breath about Norwegians for two years, and I have never once corrected him, because he is right and because he is the best foreman in Lombardy and because on my first week here he told the tile crew that if anyone spoke to me the way they spoke to the last architect he would personally throw them into the canal.
He goes back down. I stay.
This is the part nobody photographs. Not the ribbon, not the after, not the glossy spread where they put a woman in white linen in front of a restored ceiling and call her visionary.
The part I want is this one. Dust in my eyebrows.
Somebody’s cement in my fingernails. A four hundred year old room that everyone gave up on, and me, thirty feet in the air, arguing with it.
My father built boats. Wooden ones, in Bergen, in a shed that smelled of tar and coffee and cold, and the first thing he ever taught me was that you cannot fix a boat by looking at the part that is broken. The break is where the failure came out. It is never where the failure started.
He would put my hand on a plank and say, further back, Nora. Further back. Keep going.
So I keep going.
They wrote this building off in 1998. Structural report said demolish.
It sat with pigeons in it for two decades while three separate consortiums went bankrupt trying to be the ones who saved it, and a man from the city came out in 2009 with a clipboard and wrote irrecoverable under a ceiling that has held its own weight since the year the Doge died.
I put my first proposal in when I was twenty two and had nothing to my name but a diploma and an unreasonable temper.
They did not answer it. I put in another one at twenty five.
They answered that one, in a paragraph, and the paragraph used the word ambitious in the way people use it when they mean no.
Twelve years. Three rejections. One partner who believed me.
And now the scaffolding is mine and the keys are mine and the dust in my eyebrows is mine.
I am not a woman who says the word happy out loud.
My father would have found it embarrassing.
But I stand up there until the light goes long and gold through the clerestory and the sky on the ceiling starts to look like a sky, and I think, in Norwegian, because that is the language my good thoughts still come in: this is the one you wanted. You got it.
At six I climb down and I go home to my daughter.
Sophia is four and she is lying on the floor of our kitchen with her legs up the wall, which is a thing she does when she is thinking hard, and she does not say hello.
She says, “Mama. Is a building sad when it falls down?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because it is not alive.” I put my bag down. There is plaster in my hair and I do not care. “It is only sad for the people who liked it.”
She considers this with her legs up the wall. She has my father’s forehead. She has an enormous, unfashionable seriousness about her and a habit of asking the exact question you were hoping nobody would ask, and Ines says she will either run a country one day or burn one down.
“I like the broken ones,” Sophia says.
“I know you do.”
“Better than the not broken ones.”
“I know.” I get down on the floor next to her, on my back, legs up the wall, because the day is over and my spine hurts and because she is right that the ceiling looks different from here. “Do you want to know why?”
“Yes.”
“Because a broken one still needs somebody.”
She thinks about that for a long time. Then she says, “We had pasta yesterday,” in a voice of total accusation, and that is the end of the philosophy, and I laugh so hard I have to put my hand over my face.
We have pasta.
She eats it with a spoon, on principle, and she tells me about a boy at school called Enzo who has decided the moon is following him, and she informs me that she told Enzo the moon does not care about him at all, and I say, Sophia, that was unkind, and she says, “But it is true,” with such honest bewilderment that I have no answer at all.
I put her to bed at eight. She asks for the story about the church with no roof. She always asks for the story about the church with no roof.
The letter is on my desk at Lindqvist Ferrari the next morning, on top of everything, which means Ines put it there, which means Ines has already read it.
Heavy stock. Embossed. The kind of paper that is trying to tell you something before you have opened it.
There is a rule in this office that we do not open post before coffee. It is my rule. I break it, because I am thirty three years old and I have the self control of a child at a window, and I want to know.
I open it with a chisel because that is what is on my desk.
RESTRICTED INVITATION TO TENDER. Cassaro Palazzo, Milan. Phase Two: full restoration, adaptive reuse, and structural certification.
Phase Two.
I read that twice and my stomach drops in a way that has nothing to do with anything except the work, because Phase Two is the whole building.
Phase One is what I have. Phase One is the ballroom and the east wing and a budget that runs out in March.
Phase Two is the courtyard, the loggia, the entire south range, the stables, the water gardens that have been dry since Mussolini.
Phase Two is the reason I have been doing Phase One.
I have wanted the loggia since I was twenty two.
Not the ballroom. Everybody wants the ballroom.
The loggia is nine bays of stone that a man named Aurelio Cassaro built for his wife in 1607 and then never finished, because she died, and the last three bays have no capitals on the columns, they are just blank drums waiting for a decision nobody ever made.
Four hundred years of nobody making the decision.
Somebody bought it. Somebody bought the freehold, and somebody is putting the whole thing out to tender, and there is exactly one architect in Europe who holds the heritage license to touch a Grade One Lombard interior of this specific category, and she is standing in her own office with plaster in her hair reading a letter with a chisel in her other hand.
I actually smile. I want that on the record. For about nine seconds I stand there and I smile like an idiot, and I think about telling Sophia, and I think about the capitals, and I think, in the small mean private way you think when nobody is watching, three rejections.
Then I turn the page for the client name.
Tendering entity: Kastellanos Maritime Holdings PLC (London).
Signatory: A. Kastellanos, Chief Executive.
The room does not tilt. Buildings tilt. People just stand very, very still.
I read it again. I read it a third time. The letters do not rearrange themselves into anything kinder, and the little silver clip at the top of the folder is the same silver clip, it is not, it cannot be, they sell them in every stationer in Europe, but my hands have decided that it is.
There is a thing that happens in your body when you have spent four years not thinking about a name and then you see the name printed on paper in an office you built yourself with your own money in a city he has no business being in.
Your ears go first. Everything gets very far away and very clear at the same time, like the moment before you fall off something.
A. Kastellanos.
Not the company. Not procurement. Him. His initial, his hand, four letters of ink on a page that he touched.
I put my thumb on it.
I do not know why I do that. I am not proud of it. I stand in my own office with my thumb on a signature like a woman checking whether a stove is hot, and the scar aches, and outside on Via Savona somebody is unloading scaffold poles off a truck and each one rings when it lands.
Ines is in the doorway. She has been in the doorway the whole time.
“Nora.”
“I heard you come in.”
“You did not.”
I put the letter down on the desk very carefully, the way you put down something that has a fuse.
“Say the thing,” I tell her. “Whatever it is. Say it now, get it out of your mouth, because I am going to be busy in about a minute.”
Ines does not move from the doorway. She is forty and she is the only person alive who has seen me cry and she has never once mentioned it, which is why she is the only person alive who gets to talk to me like this.
“You have chased that building for twelve years,” she says.
“Yes.”
“And the man who ended you owns it now.”
“Yes.”
“Nora.” Her voice does not go soft. That is the mercy of her. “There is no version of this where you walk into that room and come out the same.”
I look at the chisel in my hand. Nineteen years old, a slipped cut, a scar on the left thumb that aches when it rains.
“There is one,” I say.