Chapter Seventeen
I go down into the cellar at noon with a torch in my teeth.
Nobody comes with me. Marco offers and I say no, because the hatch is a meter across and the vault under the loggia is a brick barrel four hundred years old and I am not putting a second body on it until I know what it is, and because I want to be somewhere that nobody can see my face.
It is cold down there. It smells of stone and old water and something faintly sweet that I have smelled in eleven crypts and have never identified.
I lie on my back on the earth floor and I put the torch on the underside of the vault.
Half a brick thick. Half. No haunching, no fill at the springing, no ties, a shell of nothing holding up a courtyard, and it has done it for four centuries by being clever and by being left alone, and if I put a prop on the floor above it I will kill it in an hour.
I lie there in the dark under my own building and I say, out loud, to nobody, “You had not asked me.”
I say it in his voice.
Then I close my eyes and lie in a cellar for one minute, which is the entire allowance, which is what I permit myself, and then I get up and climb out into the light and become a professional again.
At half past two I go and get him.
I do it in front of everybody. That is deliberate.
I cross the sala grande with the roll of paper under my arm and plaster to the elbow and I stop on my side of the line, and Marco is on the scaffold and Ilaria is at the gauges and nine men are watching, and I want witnesses to this, because I am about to do a thing I have promised myself I would not do and I would rather do it in public than do it in a corridor.
“This is structural,” I say.
“Yes.”
“I am saying it out loud so that neither of us has to pretend later. This is structural, and it is fabric integrity, and it is in the contract, clause seven, and I am not doing anything else.” My voice is completely flat. “Come and look at my drawing.”
He comes and looks at my drawing.
There is a trestle table in the north range under the window where the light is decent, and I put the roll down and open it with the flat of my hand and drop a chisel on one corner and a brick on the other.
The pier in section. The cellar vault in section, because I have been down there. The loggia above it. The load path drawn in with a rule and arrowed all the way to the ground.
And across the top of it, in my hand, three words.
Cannot go down.
“So it goes up,” I say.
“It goes up.”
“Do not agree with me yet. I have not said anything.”
“Then say it.”
I put my finger on the loggia. “I hang it. I do not carry it, I hang it. The only sound material within twenty meters of that pier is the flanking wall, and the flanking wall is a meter of solid brick and it is dry and it is bored and it has been doing nothing for four hundred years. So I put a steel needle through the window openings on either side, I brace it back into the flanking walls, and I hang the loggia off the needle on rods while I take the pier out from underneath it. Compression to tension. It stops being a column problem and it becomes a hanging problem.”
“Yes.”
“Do not say yes. Tell me why it does not work.”
He is quiet for two seconds. I watch him look at my drawing, and there is a thing that happens to his face, and I have seen it exactly once before, at the far end of a boardroom on Corso Venezia when I told nine people what was under their building. His eyes go somewhere behind the paper.
“The rods,” he says.
“Go on.”
“You are going to hang eleven tonnes of loggia off four rods and hope the load shares. It will not share. It never shares. One rod will take six tonnes and the one beside it will take four hundred kilos, and you will find out which is which when the six tonne one starts singing and the corner comes off in the night.”
He is right.
He is right, and I have known he was right since about four o’clock this morning, and I have been lying in a cellar with a torch trying to think my way out of it, and a man in a hard hat has just walked to a table and taken thirty seconds to put his finger on the exact place where my building kills itself.
“Then tell me how you would do it,” I say.
“That is not permitted.”
“Adrian.” I put both hands flat on the drawing. “The building is open. Tell me how you would do it.”
And he tells me.
“You do not hang it off rods. You hang it off jacks. Flat jacks, hydraulic, one under every rod head, all four on a single manifold with a common oil line, so that the pressure has nowhere to hide.” He puts his hand down on the paper, on the needle, next to my pencil.
“The oil equalizes what the steel will not. It is a cradle. It is exactly a cradle. You do not lift a hull on four points and pray. You lift it on a manifold, and every jack in the line is telling you the truth about what it is holding, and if one of them starts lying you see it on a gauge before you ever see it in the fabric.”
I am already writing.
I am writing around his hand. That is what I am doing, I understand it later, in the car, at midnight.
He has put his hand flat on my section and I do not move it and I do not ask him to move it, I simply draw the manifold into the margin around it, because the paper has become more urgent than the man, and that has not happened to me in four years.
“Gauge on every head,” I say.
“On every head. And a datum. You need a datum that is not the building.”
“A wire and a scale off the far wall.”
“Off the street,” he says. “The far wall is in the building.”
I laugh.
It is out of me before I have taken any decision about it.
One syllable, and I am looking at the drawing when it happens.
“Off the street. God. Yes.” I am writing.
“Then I do not need the roof at all. I do not touch the trusses, I do not go near the trusses, the trusses are the worst thing in this building.”
“The trusses are firewood.”
“The trusses are firewood,” I say, “with a Superintendency listing on them.”
“How much of the pier has to come out.”
“All of it. Every shaft, out and back, and I am putting a stainless core down the middle of it that no living person will ever see, and in a hundred years a man with a scanner is going to find it and know exactly what we did and why, because I am going to leave him a plate.”
“Where do you get the steel.”
“Brescia. Six days.”
“You have not got six days.”
“I have got four,” I say, “if somebody with a telephone and no scruples rings Brescia at seven tomorrow morning and tells them who he is.”
“Consider it rung.”
“That is not structural.”
“It is the structure,” he says, “arriving.”
And I laugh again.
I laugh, and I look up, and he is there.
He is right there, on the other side of a trestle table, with lime dust on his jacket and his hat on badly and one hand on my drawing, and for a second and a half he is not a man in a ballroom.
He is a man at a kitchen table in Bermondsey at two in the morning with a broken radiator and a bottle of Rioja and a drawing of somebody else’s roof spread over the plates, and he is arguing with me about a purlin, and he is losing, and he is enjoying losing, and I am twenty nine years old and I have no idea what is coming.
That is where I go. For one second and a half.
Then I come back.
It arrives the way water arrives in a lock. Not fast. Not a slam. It comes up through the floor of me in stages until I am standing at the same level I have stood at for four years, and I put the pencil down and I look at my own hand and my hand is perfectly steady, and my ears are ringing.
Ninety seconds.
I looked at my watch when I came across the floor and I look at it now, because I look at my watch the way other people breathe, and it has been ninety seconds since I unrolled the paper.
Ninety seconds of my life in which I did not remember.
“Thank you,” I say. “That is what we will do.”
“Nora.”
“You do not get to say that.”
“No,” he says.
I roll the drawing. I do it from the bottom, tapping the edge square on the trestle, and I get the elastic on it on the second attempt.
Then I stand there with it under my arm, and I make myself say the thing, because if I walk out of this room without saying it I will lie awake building it into something.
“Ninety seconds,” I say.
“What.”
“That is how long it was. I want you to know that I know exactly how long it was, so that you do not go away from this table and make it into something.” I am looking at the shutters, not at him. “You are extremely good at this. I did not know that about you.”
He does not say anything.
“I lived in a house with you for fourteen months,” I say.
“I did not know that about you. And I want to be very clear that this is not a compliment, because what it means is that you had a thing you were, an actual thing, and you kept it in a drawer, and you gave the rest of us the man in the suit.”
“Nora.”
“So I have spent four years hating a man who was not even all of you.” My voice does something in the middle and I take it back. “There was more of you. There was more of you the whole time, and I have had to find it out on a Thursday, in the dust, from a column.”
He stands there with his hand still on the table where my drawing used to be.
I go to the gate. I stop with one hand on the doorframe, because I am the principal architect on a nine million euro contract and there is a thing that has to be said before I go home to my daughter.
“Ring Brescia,” I say. “Seven o’clock.”