Chapter Fifty-Nine
The floor is finished on the fourteenth of July at twenty past four in the afternoon, and there are six of us in the room, and nobody says anything for about a minute.
Four hundred and eleven square metres.
Except at the north east corner, where it is wrong.
I have left it exactly as it is.
I have written eleven lines about it in the report and I have recommended, formally, in a document with my name at the bottom of it, that it is never to be corrected, and Avvocato Pavone read that paragraph out loud to the trustees in June and then took his glasses off and did not say anything for a while.
It came off by hand. All of it.
The Fondazione voted the money in January and the money was for a machine and I went to Pavone’s office in Corso Magenta and told him that if a machine went on that floor he would have to find another architect, and he asked me why, and I told him the truth, which is that a machine takes the marble out with the cement and then it is not a floor, it is a photograph of a floor.
He looked at me for a moment.
“That is not your sentence,” he said.
“No,” I said. “It is not.”
So we did it by hand, six of us, at forty minutes a square metre, from January to July, and it cost the Fondazione two hundred and forty thousand euros more than the machine and Pavone found it in nine days from three hundred and nine subscribing members who had all read a newspaper in November, and he has never once told me how.
Adrian was one of the six.
He was on the payroll from the ninth of January at forty one euros a day, which is the rate, which is what Marco’s men get, and it went through the Fondazione’s books and it went to the Revenue and he has a contribution record in the Italian state for the first time in his life.
He cashed the first one at a bank on Via Torino and stood on the pavement outside it holding forty one euros in cash in his hand for so long that Marco went back for him.
He does not know I know that. Marco told me. Marco tells me everything and always has and neither of them has ever worked that out.
At twenty past four on the fourteenth of July, Rosa takes the last of the boards up at the west end, and the six of us stand in the middle of four hundred and eleven square metres of 1604 with the light coming down the length of it from the south windows, low, because it is late, and there is not one thing in that room.
No scaffold. No trestle. No bags. Nothing on it at all for the first time in a hundred and fourteen years.
Marco Belotti takes his hat off.
He does not do it for God and he does not do it for a building.
He does it because he is fifty two and he has been on sites since he was fifteen and he knows exactly what it costs to make a thing that will still be there when everybody who touched it is dead, and there is no other gesture available to him, so he takes his hat off in an empty room and holds it against his chest and looks at the floor.
And then he puts it back on and says that we are going to the bar.
They go. All of them. I hear them go across the yard and out through the gate and I hear Rosa laughing at something on Via Cassaro.
Adrian does not go.
He is standing at the north east corner with his hands in his pockets, looking down at two and a half metres of Greek key running backwards, and he has been standing there for about two minutes.
“They noticed,” he says.
“Yes.”
“They noticed and they did not take it out.”
“No.”
“Why not.”
“Because it was Tuesday,” I say, “and the man who was going to pay them was in Venice, and the pattern is wrong and the floor is fine, and in three hundred and seventy years you are the ninth person who has looked at it long enough to see it, and I have your name for the other eight.”
He stands in an empty room and looks at a dead man’s mistake for a long time.
“It is the best thing in the building,” he says.
And I take the keys out of my jacket.
There are nine of them. They are on a steel ring the size of my hand and they weigh about four hundred grams and they have been in my pocket every day since the ninth of March four years ago, and the big one, the one for the gate, is a bit of nineteenth century iron that is nearly as long as my forearm and does not fit in any pocket I own, which is why I have a hole in every jacket I have.
“The Fondazione met on Tuesday,” I say.
He does not turn round.
“They have appointed a custode,” I say. "It is in the constitution and they have not had one since 1911 because there has been nothing here worth keeping.
He lives in the two rooms over the gatehouse, which have a stove that does not work and a window that does.
He is responsible for the fabric, the shutters, the gutters, the rain, the doors, the pigeons and the tourists.
Two hundred and forty euros a week and the flat and nothing else, ever, and Pavone made me tell you that twice.
“He keeps the building alive,” I say, “and he will never own one brick of it, and he is not permitted to change one thing in it, and if he is any good at all nobody will ever know his name.”
And I hold out nine keys on a steel ring to a man standing on a floor in an empty room.
Adrian Kastellanos turns round.
He looks at the keys in my hand. He does not take them.
“It is not my building,” he says.
“No.”
“It belongs to a foundation with three hundred and eleven members.”
“It does.”
“Nora.” And his voice is not steady, and it has not been steady since about half past four, and neither has mine. “I cannot take the keys to a building I do not own.”
“Adrian,” I say. “Ask the floor.”
And there is about a second and a half.
And then my husband laughs.
I have known that man for nine years and I have been married to him for nine years and I have watched him lose a company and a fleet and his name and both his hands, and I have never heard it.
Not once. Not in London and not in a kitchen and not in a courtyard in Milan on a step in November with my hands on his face.
It comes out of him like something being pulled up out of a well.
It is a terrible noise, it is honestly a terrible noise, it is loud and it is rusty and it goes up into four hundred and eleven square metres of 1604 and comes back off the ceiling at us twice, and he puts his hand over his eyes and it does not stop, and he sits down on the floor.
He sits down on the floor. On his own floor.
On the floor he took up with a bolster at forty minutes a metre for a hundred and one nights, in a building that is not his and never will be, and he sits down in the middle of it with his back against nothing and laughs until he cannot breathe, and there are tears coming out from under his hand, and I do not know any more which one it is and I do not think he does either.
I sit down on the floor next to him.
I put the keys in his lap.
He picks them up. He puts the ring on his finger and he lets them hang there and turn, nine keys, three hundred grams, and he looks at them the way he used to look at a term sheet.
“What does the custode do,” he says.
“He opens it at seven,” I say. “He closes it at seven. He walks the roof after rain. He counts the birds. He is the last person in the building at night and the first one in it in the morning, and he keeps the book.”
Adrian goes very still.
“He keeps the book,” he says.
“Yes.”
“Who signs him in.”
“Nobody signs him in,” I say. “He is the book.”
And I take out the old one, the site book, the green one, the one that has been on the trestle table in the gatehouse for four years and is swollen at the corner where the rain got at it in the March before last.
I open it at the twenty second of July.
Kastellanos, A. Operaio. Unqualified. Under supervision.
A hundred and one entries. In my hand, the first one, at midnight, on the ninth of September, with my own pen, because an insurer would not carry a non operative on site after dark.
I turn to the last page, which is today, and I write the last line of the last book of the Cassaro Palazzo works, and I write it in the trade column where it goes, and I hand him the pen so that he can read it upside down the way Marco did.
Kastellanos, A. Terrazzista. Qualified. Unsupervised.
He does not say anything.
He sits on a floor in an empty room with nine keys hanging off his finger and reads four words upside down, and his mouth goes, and he puts his hand over it, and I know that gesture, I have known it for nine years, it is the thing he does when he is grading himself.
And this time the mark is not bad.
There is a noise at the door of the sala grande.
My daughter is standing in it in her boots with Giulia behind her, because it is twenty to five on a Monday and she came to see the floor, because she has been asking about this floor since she was four years old and I have promised her the day it came out from under the boards.
She looks at the two of us sitting on it.
She looks at Adrian, who is making a noise she has never heard a person make in her life, with his hand over his face and his shoulders going.
“Why is he doing that,” Sophia says.
“He is laughing,” I say.
She thinks about it, with her whole face, the way she does everything.
“He is bad at it,” she says.
“Yes,” I say. “He is going to practise.”