Chapter Thirty-Three #2
I go through it the way I would go through a survey, because it is the only thing I know how to do, and because if I stop for one second I am going to be on the floor.
One. Eleni Kastellanos is a liar by trade.
She spliced a recording. She hired a dress.
She has admitted, on my pallets, in her own voice, to constructing an entire evening out of nothing, and a woman who can build a false room out of four hundred people and a microphone can certainly build a false sentence out of four thousand two hundred strangers.
Two. The lie is shaped for me. That is what I keep coming back to.
It is cut to fit. It is not a lie that makes her son innocent, it is a lie that makes him tragic, and she knows exactly what I would do with tragic, she has known since the first dinner, she watched me learn to hear the pause in front of the word boatbuilder and she has been measuring me ever since.
Three. She came to my site on a Monday morning with a coat and a hat and a palazzo and four million euros, and I said no, and six seconds later she reached into her pocket and gave me the other thing. That is not a confession. That is a second offer.
I put my head back against the scaffold pole.
Four.
Four is the one I cannot say out loud in an empty building, so I sit there on a step in the dark with my hands on my knees, and I think it, and it is this.
If it is true, I have to take four years of my life and lift them off the floor and look at what is underneath, and there is nothing underneath.
You can build a wall on nothing. That is a fact and it is my profession.
You can build a wall on a footing that was never poured, and it will stand for three hundred years, because a wall does not know, a wall is only doing what walls do, and it stands and it stands and it carries a roof and a family and a war and then one Tuesday a lorry goes past in the street and the whole thing is on the pavement in two seconds and everybody says, but it was fine, it was fine yesterday.
I have built a life on the sentence he looked at me and he decided I was survivable.
I said it to Ines in a bar six days ago. I said it to a ceiling in Palermo. I have said it in the shower and in a car and at ten past six in the morning before the kettle, every day, for four years, and it has held up a child and a company and a country and a woman who does not cry.
And if what he actually did was sit in a chair and price me against four thousand two hundred people, then he did not decide I was survivable.
He decided I was expensive.
And that is not the same sentence. That is not the same building.
I ring Ines at ten at night and she picks up on the fourth ring in Genoa and she is asleep and she does not pretend she is not.
I tell her all of it. It takes nine minutes and I do it in the correct order, standing in a stone room with the lights off, and Ines Ferrari does not interrupt me once.
Then she says, “What if it is true.”
“It is not true.”
“Nora.”
“It is not true, Ines, and I am going to prove it is not true.”
There is a silence on the line, and it is the silence of a woman sitting up in a bed in another city and putting a lamp on.
“Listen to yourself,” she says. “You did not say, I am going to find out. You said, I am going to prove it is not.”
“Yes.”
“You are an investigator with a verdict.”
“Yes,” I say. “I am aware of what I am. I am not looking for the truth, Ines, I have never once in my life needed to be told what the truth is, I am looking for the version of it I can go on living inside, and there is only one of those, and it is the one where he did what everybody in that ballroom saw him do.”
I hear her breathe out.
“Then go and find the woman,” Ines says.
I have the folder in a box under the bed and I have not opened it in four years.
I get it out at half past midnight with my daughter asleep in the next room, and I sit on the floor of my sitting room with the rug I cleaned last week, and I take the lid off, and it is all there, because I am the kind of person who keeps things in order even while her life is being taken off the wall in sheets.
The annulment papers. The running order. The place card.
The place card is what I take out.
It is cream, and it is stiff, and it is printed, and it says CELINE MARCHETTI in a font I could name, and it was on the head table at the Kastellanos centenary gala on the ninth of November, and it was in the seat that had my name on it six days earlier when the plan went to the printer.
I have looked at this card a hundred times and I have never once seen it.
It is printed.
You do not print a place card in an evening.
You do not print a place card while a recording is playing.
That card was ordered with the others, in a batch, on a proof, by a woman with a pencil who cannot bear a thing to be crooked, and it was ordered days before my husband ever sat down at that table.
Which means the room was built before he walked into it.
I put the card down on the rug.
“That proves nothing,” I say, out loud, to an empty room, in a flat in Milan, at one in the morning. “A woman can be seated and slept with. Those are not the same fact.”
My hands are shaking again and I hold them still by putting them flat on the floor.
Sophia comes in at two.
She does it without a sound. That is a thing she has done since she could walk and it takes about ten years off my life every time, and I look up and my daughter is standing in the doorway of the sitting room in a nightdress with her hair on one side of her head, perfectly well, cool as a stone, cured.
“You are on the floor,” she says.
“Yes.”
“With papers.”
“Yes.”
She comes over and she sits down on the rug opposite me, cross legged, in the middle of the night, with the whole judicial calm of a person who has recently had a fever and got over it and now considers herself an authority on suffering.
She looks at the box. She looks at the place card.
“Is it work,” she says.
And I sit on the floor of my own flat at two in the morning with the evidence of my marriage laid out on a rug between me and my child, and I lie to her, the way I have lied to her for four years, and it goes down like a stone in a well.
“Yes,” I say. “It is work.”
“Is the building broken more.”
“No.”
“Then why is your face flat.”
I put the lid back on the box.
I take her to bed. She goes without a fight, which she never does, and at the door of her room she says, into my collarbone, in a voice that is already three quarters asleep, “The man on the step had a book.”
“Yes.”
“He was going to say something.”
“Go to sleep, Sophia.”
“He was, though,” she says, with her eyes shut, in the tone of a woman correcting a survey. “He had the shape of it in his mouth.”
I look for Celine Marchetti until three.
There is nothing. There is a scrubbed thing where a person should be.
There is a deleted profile and a dead email at a design consultancy in Rome that no longer exists and a photograph on a charity page from 2019 with her face turned away and a caption with somebody else’s name in it.
A woman does not disappear like that by accident.
A woman disappears like that because somebody with a coat and a pencil paid for it, or because she has been called a homewrecker in three languages for four years and she has taken her name off the world with her own two hands.
At ten past three I text Ines, because Ines knows every person in the north of Italy who has ever touched a piece of cloth.
Textile. She was in fabrics or design, I think. Marchetti. She may not be using it.
The reply comes at twenty to four, and Ines has been awake, and I do not deserve her.
Celine Marchetti. Textile conservation, Fondazione Ratti archive, Turin. Two years. Nora, she is forty five minutes from you.
I sit on the floor of my sitting room with a place card in my hand.
Forty five minutes. She has been forty five minutes down a railway line for two years, working with dead cloth in a cold room, while I have been in Milan telling a woman in a bar that she was somebody’s furniture and she had been carried in.
I did not look for her once.
I want to be honest about that, because I am going to be honest about everything from here and I may as well start with the part that belongs to me. I had four years and an internet connection and I never typed her name, not once, and I told myself it was dignity.
It was not dignity. It was that I already knew what she would say, and I could not afford to be wrong.
The first train to Turin is at six ten.
I have been getting up at six ten every morning for fifteen years, for a building, in the dark, because the first half hour belongs to me and I do not share it.
It has never once been for a person.