CHAPTER 4
A MAN. BEFORE.
Matias
I did the number before the coffee, which by then was already the shape of my mornings — the stub of chalk off the nail by the door, eighty-six pressed onto the frame under the eighty-seven I had smudged out with my thumb, and then a step back to look at it, because a man has to look at the thing his hands did even when the thing is a number on a door, and eighty-six was how many days stood between me and San Martino, the party with the oil and the fires that everybody kept promising and nobody would explain, and I had counted it out under my breath to the dog, who did not care, and written it up there in the dark so that the first thing the house told me every day was how much time was left of something I could not name.
They came at seven. I heard the vans before I saw them, low down on the track, and I was out in the yard with two coffees already made and a third going, holding them like a fool, offering them up to men who climbed down having drunk their coffee standing at a bar in the valley ninety minutes before, which I did not know yet, so I stood there being lovely at people who did not need me to be, and one of them, an older one, took a cup to be kind and set it on the wall untouched, and that was the first thing I learned that day, that kindness here ran the other direction from mine and I had it backwards.
I had nothing to do with my hands. Not that morning, not on this site, with these men who did not need me.
I owned the house and the olives and the roof I was not allowed to climb, and through the propped-open door I could see the barrel vault over the ground floor, cracked all the way along its crown and standing there anyway on nothing but habit, and I owned that too, and I stood in my own yard and I watched.
And what I watched, though it took me the whole morning to see it as one thing, was the work move around the house with the sun.
They did not start where the light was. They started where the light was not — the cold faces, the shaded low walls — and as the morning came up over the hill they went the other way, off the bright stone and onto the next dim thing, so that all day the whole site turned slowly around the house like water going down, keeping to the shadow, and I could not have told you why and nobody told me and I decided it was a habit rather than a reason, because a reason would have meant there was something here I did not understand, and there were only about a thousand of those, and I was still counting them as charm.
Once, early, I tried to help. A man came off a van with a bundle of laths on his shoulder and I went to take the other end of it, the most natural thing in the world, the thing you do, and he turned his shoulder so the weight stayed his and said something short and easy that I did not need Italian to understand, and it was not a no exactly, it was gentler than a no, it was the way you move a child off the good knife, and he carried the laths past me to where they were going and I stood there with my hands out and nothing in them, palms up in the heat, open and holding nothing.
I looked at them a second and put them away, one in a pocket and then the other.
I had crossed an ocean to a house at the end of a track and there was a line around it I could not name and could not see and had already, twice, without meaning to, walked up to.
The first tool of the day was a hose.
A man stood at the base of a wall for twenty minutes and watered it.
Not the ground, the wall — up and down, patient, the stone going dark and then darker, a puddle spreading at his boots, and he did it the way you water a plant you love, without hurry and without looking at anything else, and when he was done he coiled the hose and walked off and nobody touched that wall for an hour.
I stood there with my cold coffee and I tried to make it mean something.
A house is a thing you keep the water out of.
Everything I knew about a house was that you kept the water out of it, and here was the first act of the whole restoration, a man putting water into the wall on purpose, and I filed it under the enormous soft heading of things they do here and I let it go, and that is the whole trouble with me in one sentence, that I will let a thing go rather than stand in front of it and not understand it.
* * *
Round the back the house had a wall nobody was working on, and it was the one I could stand at, because the site had a shape — a line of tape, a perimeter, an inside I was politely and completely not inside — and the north wall was outside all of it, out past the half of roof that was still on, the old flat tiles holding, and the half that was gone under its sheet lifting a little in the moving air, and I went round there to be out of the way and I stayed for a reason I did not have.
It was cold. That is the thing I could not get past. It was the middle of August and the hill behind me was at some furnace number and the front of the house had been white with heat since nine, and I came round the corner and the air changed, and I put my hand out toward the stone before I even reached it, the way you put your hand toward a fridge you have opened, and it was cold, the joint dark and holding damp at chest height at ten in the morning, moss in the low courses, a grey-green lichen up high like a rash of coins, and it was cold because the sun had not been on it since November and would not be on it again until spring, and I stood in the one cold place in the whole comune and did not want to leave it.
And the wall was wrong. I want to be careful here because I did not have any of the words, I had never in my life had a single word for a wall, and still I stood there and I could see that this was not the wall for a postcard, that the joint was pushed back deep between the stones and not piped out proud and pretty the way I had always thought a good wall was supposed to look, that the big pale stones were doing all the standing and the small ones were driven in tight around them like wedges, locking, and that the whole thing had a rhythm to it, a way the courses ran, and that the rhythm changed — about two-thirds of the way along it changed, got tighter, more careful or more tired, I could not tell which, as if the man had stopped there and slept and come back a different man in the morning, or the light had gone and he had finished the last of it by feel, and I could read that, I who could not read the deed on my own kitchen table or the form at the Questura or the name of the party on my own door frame, I could read that a person had been here and had gotten tired two-thirds of the way along sixty metres of stone and had kept going, and I could not have told you how I knew and I did not
and I put my hand on it.
Flat, both hands, the grit of it coming up under my palms, the cold going into my wrists, and I held them there too long and then I remembered he might be watching and I took them off too fast and put them in my pockets like a kid caught at the good plates.
He was watching. He had come round the corner with a hose in one hand, off duty, or between things, and he did not say anything about my hands on his wall, and I felt the not-saying, and to fill it, because a silence is a hole and I have never once in my life left a hole unfilled, I asked him.
"Who did this?"
He put his own hand flat on the stone before he answered, which I would come to know was the thing he did, though I did not know it then, and I saw the back of that hand up close for the first time — the old burns healed pale across the knuckles and running down onto the inside of the forearm, the nails cut back to nothing with something grey worked in under them that no washing was ever going to lift — and he looked at the wall and not at me.
"A man," he said.
I waited. Nothing came. So I gave him the next one, the easy one, the one that opens people up.
"When?"
"Before," he said.
And that was it. That was the whole of it.
Two questions and four words and a wall sixty metres long that a man had built, or mended, before, and I kept standing there the way you keep standing after a sentence that has more coming, because in my world an answer is a doorway and you walk through it into the next room and the next, who and when and then the story, the man's name and how he came to do it and what year and whether it was hard, all the furniture of a thing, and none of it came, and I understood slowly and badly that for him the four words were not a door left half-open. They were the answer.
I asked one more anyway. I do not even remember what it was — how long it took, or whether he had been the one, thrown at a shut thing.
He looked at me. It was not unkind. I have gone back over it since and it was not unkind at all; there was nothing cold in his face, nothing closed.
It was only that the look was not asking me in, and I have been let into rooms my whole life on a smile, and here was a man who could look straight at me with no smile and no cruelty anywhere in it and simply not open, and I did not know what to do with my own face.
He went back to work.
* * *
The boy saved me, the way the young save you, by not caring about any of it.
He came up the track on a scooter with no helmet and a bag from the shop swinging off the handlebar, eighteen, all elbows, and he took one look at me standing at the wall like it was a painting in a museum and made a sound in the back of his throat that needs no translation in any language on earth, the sound a young man makes at an old thing his elders find holy.
"Mattia," he said to me — they had all had my name for a week now and it was Mattia, it had been Mattia since the second day and I had stopped hearing the difference — and then a long fast run of the dialect that I lost after the first three words, of which I got the shape and not the meaning, but I understood from his face and his hands and one flick of the chin at his uncle's back that he thought the man was a hundred years old inside his head, that a wall was a wall, that there were places to be in this life that were not here, and he was funny about it, genuinely funny, and I laughed because he wanted me to and because he was right, his uncle was a man out of another century, and also because he was wrong, and I could not have said how he was wrong, only that I had just had my hands on the how.
The dog was asleep against the cold side of the wall.
Of course she was; it was the coolest stone in the comune and she was no fool.
And when he came back round the corner, the man, with an armful of I did not see what, she got up off the cold and went to him, unhurried, and put her head against his leg, and he stood a second and let her, and did not look down, and did not say her name, and I stood in the yard I owned and I wanted, very plainly, with a plainness that embarrassed me, for the ownerless dog to come and put her head against my leg like that, and she did not, and I did not say so.
A memory came up while I stood there, small and stupid and out of nowhere: a wall in a hallway of a house I grew up in, a crack in the plaster, and my father filling it with something white out of a tube from the hardware store, and it cracking again by winter, and the tube coming out again, and again, year after year, the same crack, the same tube, everyone in the house treating it as weather.
I do not know why it came. I put it away.
Something had opened up under the floor of me, standing at that wall, and I did not have the name for it.
It was not sadness. I let it close. I went and made another coffee that nobody wanted and carried it out to the yard, and the day went on turning around the house, keeping to the shadow, and I chalked nothing new, because the number was already up there in my own hand and I had done my one job at dawn.
But I kept it, the wall. I did not go back and put my hands on it again that day, because he was there and I did not want him to see me needing it.
I only knew it was round the back, cold in all that heat, a thing a man did before, and that the one man alive who could tell me what it was had told me, and meant it completely, and I had not been able to hear that it was complete.
I waited for the rest of it. There was not any rest of it.