CHAPTER 3
THE GOOD END OF THE TABLE
Malick
We put the tables up in an afternoon, twenty of us, on ground that has never once been flat.
The trestles go on the high side first, and then you pack the low legs with whatever the field gives you — a flat stone, a folded board, a wedge cut for something else a long time ago and kept.
I know where the stones are. I have packed these legs before.
A board that rocks under the plates will rock all night and there is a man who lets it and a man who does not, and I am the second man, and nobody has ever thanked me for it because nobody has ever noticed a table that did not move.
I came down past the casale on foot in the early afternoon.
On the door frame the American had chalked a number, in his own hand, big, the way a child does sums — eighty-eight.
It would be eighty-seven in the morning.
He is the only one who touches the chalk.
I read it the way I read the gauges, without stopping, and I did not touch it, and I went on down to where the boards were going up.
Palla came across the grass before I had the first board down and put her head against my leg and stayed there while I worked around her. She is fed at every door in this comune and she comes to mine. I made nothing of it. I moved the board and she moved with it and lay down again on my foot.
The boards went down and the generator went in the shade so the wine would stay cold, and the grill was lit early because the man who lights it likes an hour to be wrong about the coals before anyone is watching.
It was Ferragosto. Nobody works today, which is exactly why all of us worked — carrying is not work, carrying is the party, and a man who will not carry has told you something about himself.
I brought my own chair. I have always brought my own chair.
The men who put the tables up are always the same men.
Not the oldest, who are owed their sitting, and not the ones who came for the summer and will be gone before the frantoio — the ones who stayed, and are still young enough to lift, and it is a short list and it gets shorter.
We do not talk much while we work. You hand a man the end of a board and he takes it, and you both already know where it goes.
I have done this beside some of them since I was a boy.
There is a kind of talking that is only the passing of boards from hand to hand, and all of us are fluent in it, and it says nothing, and it is not nothing.
By the last of the afternoon there was smoke standing in the light and forty people finding the length of the boards with their elbows, and under all of it the sound the day actually makes, which is chairs dragged on grass, and a fridge nobody owns being opened and shut and opened, and wasps working the cut fruit at the far end.
My mother had her torta on the stone at the near end where the heat is right.
Nella had her thing on the same boards, two plates down, and every person at that table knew which was which and said so to neither woman.
My mother makes the better one. Nella knows she does.
They have been gracious to each other across those two plates for forty years and they will die gracious and neither of them will ever say a true word about the other one's crust. My mother does not need to.
She wins on purpose, every year, because she likes winning, and then she carries a slice down to Nella herself and asks after her sister.
I carried. A crate of bottles came off the back of a van and I took it up on my hip, where the corner of it goes, where it has worn a place, and I carried it up the slope to where the drink was kept. That is a thing to do with your hands at a table. It is also just a crate.
* * *
Valerio was pouring. He pours the way he does everything, without hurry, moving down the boards with a bottle in each hand and a word for the person at every glass, and he had mud still dark under one thumbnail from the morning because he had been up in his olives at six and had not scrubbed it out, and every man he poured for was glad he had come.
He is glad to be there. He is the best neighbour any of us have and I will not pretend he is not.
I have watched him carry my mother's chair into the shade with his own hands and ask about her knees and hear the whole answer and remember it in September, which is more than I do.
She likes him. He is easy to like. I have never once told her not to.
He had stopped at my mother first, before he ever reached the American.
He carried the good plate down to her himself and set it by her hand, and he stood there while she told him about her knees, all of it, the left one and the right one and the doctor down the valley who is no use — and she was happy telling it.
I sat where I was and watched her be happy.
I said nothing to her about it. There is nothing I could say that would not take the afternoon off her, and she has few enough of these left in the knees she was telling him about.
He had the American by the elbow. He walked him down to the good end of the table — there is a good end, it is the end out of the smoke with its back to the wall, and everyone in this village knows where it is and no one has ever said so aloud — and he set him down there in the seat without asking him and without the American understanding he had been set anywhere at all.
Mattia went where he was put and believed he had chosen it.
He is easy to move. It is one of the pleasant things about him and I had already decided it was the whole of him: the rich one who would paint the house white and put water where the olives are and be gone in two summers.
And then Valerio told him who I was.
I was up the slope with the crate still on my hip and I heard it start, because he was not quiet, because there was nothing in it to be quiet about.
He told the American where my people had come from.
He told him what my father had done — the lime, the years on the scaffolds down the valley, the lungs at the end of it — and he told it warmly, admiringly, the way you tell a good thing you are glad to be the one who knows.
He said how far the family had come. He said it was remarkable.
He meant every word, and it was the highest praise he has, and then he turned the American on the bench toward me with the neck of the bottle, so he could see me up the slope, and he said that my Italian was perfect. That you would never know.
I was born within sight of the roof we were eating under. I learned my Italian in the same schoolroom as every grey head at those boards. There is no other Italian in me. That is the part I have never found the shape of, so I have never said it, and I did not say it now.
The table smiled. It was a good story, well told, and it was kind, and Nella two plates down was frowning at her own crust and did not hear a word of it, and my mother was laughing at something a cousin had said and did not either.
I set the crate down where the crate went.
My face did the thing my face does at that table, which is nothing at all.
I did not correct him. There is nothing in it to correct — every word of it was true.
The American laughed.
He laughed half a second late. It is only the length of a man hearing a thing, and hearing himself about to laugh at it, and then laughing because the table already has and the wine is good and the afternoon is long.
I know what it is. I am not going to put a word on it.
He got there, and the laugh was a good one once it came, easy, all the way up from the chest — and then he lifted a hand and waved me down toward the good end, come, sit, sit — and I lifted the empty crate to show him it was not empty of things it still needed, and I did not come.
He watched me not come. I watched him decide it was shyness. I watched him settle on it, and be satisfied, and pour himself back into the table, which is easier for him, and better for him, and I let him have it.
At the drinks, a man asked me whether the American would last the winter up in that house on his own.
I told him what the frost does to a joint that goes in green.
"It looks finished," I said. "It looks like the best wall you ever built, right until the first hard freeze, and then the face comes off it in your hand and you find it never keyed at all — it was drinking the water the whole time and telling you nothing.
" The man nodded like I had said it might rain by Thursday.
* * *
The light went the way it goes here, all at once off the top of the ridge and then a long slow give in the valley below it.
Ibu had taken himself off with the ones his own age and would not be seen again till he was hungry.
My mother had the mate in front of her, the American's gourd, that ugly, good-looking thing he carries everywhere, and she had taken to it in a single day and was smug about the speed of it, and Nella would not put her mouth to it and said so, loudly, more than once, on principle — which is Nella's entire way of wanting a thing she has decided she is not allowed.
The boar came up, as it does at that table every year.
Every man on the boards had a theory about where it had come down out of the hills this season, and a cousin with a licence, and a story about the cousin, and none of the theories agreed with any of the others, and the disagreeing is the whole pleasure of it.
I have a cousin with a licence too. I kept my theory to myself, which is also a way of enjoying it.
The American could not sit still at the good end.
He is a guest at a table that is not his, in a village three days old to him, and still he was leaning the length of it filling other men's glasses, asking who was coming tomorrow and what they would all eat, telling a man across from him to sit, sit, there is room, when the man was already sitting and already had all the room he wanted.
He fills a table the way water fills a low place.
I ate, and I watched him do it, and I will say only that he was easy to watch.
I sat at my end with my own chair under me and I ate, and it was a good afternoon.
I want to be plain about that, because a man could carry it home and tell it wrong.
It was one of the good ones. The wine was cold and someone else's, the torta was my mother's, the dog was asleep across my foot and twitching at a dream, and there was no unkindness on that ground anywhere that you could point a finger at.
Nobody there wished me a single bad thing.
I have answered the question about where I am really from about once a month for as long as I can put a memory to it, and always by people who love me, at their own tables, with their hand on my arm — and you learn to give the answer the way you give directions to a road, plainly, pointing, without any heat in it, so the person asking can get to where they already think they are going.
Valerio came back down the boards with the bottle near the end of the light.
He filled the American's glass, and then mine, unasked, and he stayed a moment over us, and then he said the other thing, and he said it in the same voice he had said the first — pleasantly, lightly, as a nothing, a courtesy he had happened to remember between one pour and the next.
"The track," he said. "Up to your door. You know it crosses my land — always has, since before either of us was thought of. My father and the Semproni, in their day. A handshake, and that was that." He smiled down at the American, warm, the whole of him warm. "Between friends we don't need paper."
And I watched Mattia take it. I watched it land on him as a gift, which it was, and I watched it move him, which it did, and before Valerio had the cork back in the bottle the American was already offering to pay — for the gravel, for new stone laid the length of it, for a man to come and grade it properly before the rains.
And Valerio was already refusing, gently, laying his flat hand over the mouth of the glass as though the offer were a fly he could keep off it, no, no, between friends, please — and Mattia was refusing to be refused, leaning in, delighted, and the two of them went round it once and then twice, each of them charmed to the teeth with the other.
Every lorry of lime I have ever brought up that track came up it by the grace of that same dead handshake, and I have laughed at this same table to keep the road open under my own wheels, and I said nothing at all now.
It was not mine to say. The chair, the wine, and the road, in one pour, and I have watched him do it a hundred times in my life and I have never once seen him know that he was doing anything.
Somebody called across the boards for another crate. I stood up out of my own chair.
Nobody said anything, and Malick carried the crate to where it was going.