Chapter Forty-Five
I go at eleven at night.
I put Sophia to bed at half past seven and I sit at the kitchen table until ten with a hundred and forty pages of a report I am not reading, and at ten Giulia comes over from the floor below with her knitting and does not ask me anything, and I take my keys and I go.
The building at night is a different animal.
That is not romance. It is physics. Stone that has had sun on it all day is letting it go, and the whole of the Cassaro breathes out between ten and three, and the timbers move, and you can hear the north pier ticking like an engine cooling.
I have stood in this courtyard at midnight four hundred times in my life and it has never once frightened me.
It frightens me tonight and I know exactly why, and it is not the building.
There is one light on. Not the work lights. One of the little yellow ones on a stand, thrown low across the floor of the sala grande, and it comes out of the doorway across the stone of the loggia and lies on the ground in a shape like a page.
The gate is open. The book is on the trestle. I turn it around before I go in, because I am who I am, and there is his name and the time, twenty two eleven, and under purpose of visit the date, and the pen put down parallel to the edge.
I sign myself in.
Then I take a hat off the peg and I put it on before the line, and I walk into the room.
He is on his knees in the middle of my ballroom.
He has taken his jacket off and it is folded over a trestle and he is in a shirt with the sleeves turned to the elbow, and he has a lump hammer in his right hand and a brick bolster in his left, and he is on his knees on a folded sack in the middle of four hundred and eleven square meters of floor, and he is taking the 1911 cement screed off my terrazzo by hand.
Twelve centimeters at a time.
I stand in the doorway of that room and I do not make a sound, and I watch him for about ninety seconds, and I do the arithmetic, because arithmetic is the only thing standing between me and the floor.
I costed this. In the second week, in a spreadsheet, at a kitchen table.
Four hundred and twenty thousand euros and fourteen months and a specialist crew from Vicenza, because you cannot put a machine on a terrazzo alla veneziana laid in 1604, a machine will take the marble out with the cement and there is no putting it back, and the only method that exists is a man with a bolster and a mallet and a great deal of patience, going in at an angle, taking off the screed in flakes.
Forty minutes a square meter. That is the rate. I know it because I have done it, on a chapel floor in Bergamo, for six weeks, when I was twenty six, and I got tendonitis in both wrists and I was proud of it for two years.
It came off the scope on the eleventh of May. I took it off myself. I signed the variation with my own hand and I have not been able to walk across this room since without putting my boot on it.
I look at the floor.
He has done a strip along the north wall and out into the room in a rough square, and it is uncovered and it is swept and it is wet where he has been washing it back, and under four hundred years and one very stupid century of cement it is white and grey and a red the color of an old brick, and there is a border in it, a Greek key, running along under the wall where nobody has seen it since 1911.
Thirty one square meters. Perhaps thirty two.
Nineteen nights.
At forty minutes a meter, in five hours a night, a man does seven and a half meters.
He is doing less than two. He is doing it badly and slowly and he is doing it right, and he is four hundred and twelve meters into a job that will take him, at the rate his hands can go, two hundred and fifty more nights, and he does not own this building, and by Friday he will not own anything at all.
He knows I am here. He has known since I came through the door. He does not stop.
He finishes the piece he is on, and he lifts the flake off with the bolster and puts it in the bucket, and he sets the tools down on the sack, side by side, parallel, and then he sits back on his heels with his hands hanging over his knees and he looks at the floor.
And then he stands up.
And I see his hands.
“Adrian.”
“The screed is only bonded in patches,” he says. “It is worse near the door. Rosa told me where the hollow was. She has been giving me the survey.”
“Rosa.”
“And Marco. And Ilaria did the first three nights with me because she did not trust me with the bolster and she was right.” He is looking at the floor and not at me.
“I am not touching anything above the skirting. I am not touching the plaster. I have not been on the boards once. It is a floor, and it is a covering, and it is not in the certification, and it is not fabric that anybody has an opinion about, and I read your method statement nine times before I picked up a tool.”
“Your hands.”
“Yes.”
“Show me your hands.”
He does not want to. He does it.
And I stand in the middle of my ballroom at ten past eleven at night and I look at the hands of a man who has signed for a hundred and ten million euros with a steady hand, and they are split across the knuckles and the right one is bandaged badly with something that is not a bandage, and there are two nails on that hand that are going to come off, and the callus on the base of his thumb has torn and been torn again.
“You are going to lose those nails.”
“Yes.”
“Why are you doing this.”
And Adrian Kastellanos, who has not made one sound in thirteen weeks that was not about a wall, puts his hands down at his sides.
“Because you took it off the scope on the eleventh of May,” he says, "and you signed the variation yourself, and I watched you do it, and you put the pen down and you went and stood in the loggia for six minutes with your back to the room.
"And because I am going to lose this building on Friday, and whoever gets it will put a machine on this floor, because a machine is nine days and a man is two hundred and fifty nights, and there is not one person on this earth who is going to pay for two hundred and fifty nights.
So the machine comes, and the terrazzo goes into a skip, and in twenty years somebody writes a paper about the Cassaro floor and there is one photograph of it from 1908 and nothing else.
“So I am taking off as much of it as I can before Friday,” he says. “And whoever comes after me will see what is under there, and they will not be able to unsee it, and they will find it very difficult to bring a machine into a room with a Greek key border looking at them.”
He picks up the bucket and moves it four inches, which is a thing to do with his hands.
“That is all it is,” he says. “It is not a gift. You cannot take it and I am not offering it to you. It is a floor in a building that is not mine, and I am doing it at night so that it does not cost you a working hour, and when I am gone you may put whatever you like on top of it.”
I stand there.
“You called the note,” I say.
“Yes.”
“You did it on the nineteenth of July.”
“Yes.”
“The morning after.” My voice is doing something. “Twelve hours after I stood in this room and told you what you were, and you have signed the book in my yard every day since and you have never said one word about it.”
“Yes.”
“Why did you not tell me.”
And he looks at me for the first time since I came into the room.
“Because it would have been a receipt,” Adrian says.
“And you are not a creditor, and there is no sum on this earth that buys the ninth of November, and if I had walked in here on the twentieth of July with a newspaper in my hand I would have been a man presenting an invoice, and you would have had to be reasonable about it. You have been made to be reasonable about a great many things you did not choose. I am not adding to the pile.”
The building ticks. The lamp is very low and it makes the floor go on forever.
“I am going to say one thing,” he says, “and then I am going to stop, and I have been standing in this room for nineteen nights getting it into the right order, so I am going to do it badly anyway.”
“Adrian.”
“I am not asking you to take me back.”
He says it flatly, and it lands in that room like a plate going down on stone.
“I want you to hear that in a sentence with nothing else in it, because if I leave any room in it at all you will spend the next four years wondering whether it was in there, and I have taken enough of your years. I am not asking for it. Not tonight. Not in a year. Not on the day you finish this building and not on the day I am finished in a court. It is not on the table and I am never going to put it on the table, and you do not have to spend one hour of your life defending yourself against it.”
He stops. He takes the breath. The breath before the second half of the sentence, the one I know, the one I have known since a lecture theatre in Rotterdam, the one that is a man checking the sum one last time before he commits to it.
“I am asking for one hour a week with my daughter.”
The room does not move.
“That is the entire request,” he says. "One hour.
Once. Anywhere you say. You stay in the room or you do not, and you may end it in any week for any reason, or for none, and you do not have to tell me why.
She does not have to know who I am. I will not tell her, and I will not ask you to tell her, and if you want me to be a man who comes on a Thursday then I will be a man who comes on a Thursday for twenty years.
"There is nothing in writing. There will never be anything in writing. I have instructed Gideon Farrell that if I ever telephone him and ask him for a schedule he is to resign, and I did that in April, before I knew any of this, and you may write to him and he will tell you.
“The trust is done. It is irrevocable and it is not connected to this and it does not depend on it. If you say no to me tonight, the shares stay exactly where they are, and she has them at twenty five, and she never has to hear my name.”
He puts his hands behind his back, which is what that man does when he is about to be seen.
“I have nothing,” Adrian says. "I want you to have that, because it is the only reason I am allowed to ask.
I have no company and no shares and no insurance and no house, and on Friday I will have a great deal less than that, and there is not one thing in my hands, and I cannot give you anything and I cannot take anything from you and I could not enforce a single word of this if you threw me out of that gate tonight and told Marco to change the locks.
"So I am asking. Out loud. In a room. With nothing in my hands.
“One hour.”
And then Adrian Kastellanos stops talking.
And he stands in the middle of a floor he is never going to own, in a shirt with his sleeves rolled up and his hands behind his back and blood on his knuckles, and he waits.
He waits.
He does not fill it. He does not add a sentence. He does not offer me a reason, or a term, or a way out, or a joke, or a piece of arithmetic, and he does not look away, and he does not do the thing he has done in every room of his entire life, which is to price it and put it down and walk.
He stands in a doorway with nothing in his hands and he waits to be told.
And that is the thing.
That is the thing I told him he had never once in his life been able to do, in this room, twenty three days ago, and he went grey, and he said yes.
And I stand twelve feet from my husband in the middle of the best floor in Milan and I cannot say a word, because a man has finally done the one thing I said he could not do, and he has done it for an hour a week, and not for me.