CHAPTER 6
WITHIN EIGHT DAYS
Matias
I chalked the number before it was light, eighty-two, over the smear where eighty-three had been, and the frame was damp from the night so the chalk dragged and crumbled and I had to go back over the two twice, pressing, which is a thing I had learned in eight days — that chalk hates a wet surface, that it wants dust, that the door frame at Casa Semproni was the one place in the world where anybody let me leave a mark.
Then I got in the car, because today was the eighth day, and a man had told me at the table, kindly, over wine, that if I did not go down and put myself on the right paper within eight days of arriving I would be a problem, and nobody wanted me to be a problem, everybody wanted me to be legal, they said it the way you tell a child to wear a coat.
So I went down. In the dark, no mate, because I had not found the thing you boil water in, and the dog was asleep on the step and did not lift her head, and the valley below the village was a bowl of fog with the tops of things coming out of it, and it was beautiful, it was genuinely the most beautiful commute a person could have, and I priced it anyway — worked out, going down the switchbacks, what a view like this cost per month somewhere a person could not chalk a number on a door — because that is a thing I do, I cannot help it, I put a number on the light coming up over a hill and I think it is a way of loving it.
The tabaccheria opened at seven and I was the first one in it.
I needed a stamp. Not a stamp for a letter — a stamp for the State, a revenue stamp, sixteen euros of official paper you have to buy before the State will read anything you hand it.
The man tore it off the same little pad he sold the woman ahead of me her scratch cards from, between a lottery slip and a single cigarette for a man who was not supposed to buy single cigarettes, and I paid and moved.
He asked my name for the receipt. I gave it. I said Mattia, the way they say it, because it was faster, and he wrote it down, and that was all.
Then the coffee, standing up, ninety seconds, because that is how it is done here and I had learned that too — you do not sit for a coffee in the morning, you stand at the bar and drink it hot and hard and you are gone — and the man made it without being asked and I paid a euro ten and it was, I will say now, looking back, one of exactly two transactions I made that entire day that worked the way I wanted transactions to work, where I gave money and got the thing and everybody felt fine about it.
I did not know yet that it was one of two.
I thought the day was going to be full of them.
I am, I have been told, an optimist, though the person who told me that did not mean it as a compliment.
* * *
The Questura was forty minutes further down, in the town, in a building the color of a filing cabinet, and there was a queue before the door opened and the queue was the whole province.
I want to be clear about the queue, because I got it wrong for the first half hour.
I thought I was the odd one. I thought I was the foreigner in the room, the American with the folder, and I had my folder, I had made it at a kitchen table three thousand miles from that door, months ago, with tabs, actual tabs, labeled, because I am a person who believes a tabbed folder is a kind of prayer.
And I stood there feeling like the exception and it took me thirty minutes of watching to understand that I was not the exception, I was the median, that the room was full of people with folders, some of them thicker than mine and older than mine and softer at the corners from being carried to this door many times, and that they had been doing this — this exact queue, this exact building — for thirty years, some of them, and that the newest thing in the room was not me, it was the machine on the wall that gave out the numbers.
You took a number. It printed on a little slip, warm, and it had your place on it, and there was a screen up near the ceiling with a red number on it that went up by one every four minutes, I timed it, four minutes, and I did the math on my slip against the screen the way you do, and it was going to be a while, and I settled in on a plastic chair bolted to the chair next to it in a row of chairs all bolted to each other so that when the man four seats down shifted his weight I felt it come along the whole rank like a small tide, and the light was that light, the flat white overhead light that has no morning in it and no evening, that is just on, and there was the smell of a photocopier working somewhere, that hot ozone smell, and under it a smell of many coats.
I talked to the woman next to me because I cannot not.
She had a folder too. I asked her — carefully, because my Italian is nothing, it is truly nothing, I have four words and two of them are food — I got across that I did not understand my form, and she took it, this stranger, and she read it for me, running a finger down it, telling me which line was which in a slow kind voice like you would use on a large friendly dog, and she filled one part in for me in small careful capitals, and I thanked her, I thanked her too much, the way I do.
She got one line wrong. I would not find that out for weeks.
She was being kind and she was wrong and neither one cancelled the other.
Somebody behind me asked what I was doing up here — to fill the queue, the loose easy way a man talks to the stranger bolted to the chair beside him.
I said I had bought a house. They asked which.
And here is the thing that happened, that I noticed even then, in the moment, sitting in the bolted chair: I said the name of the comune and I got it perfectly, every syllable, I have said it a thousand times and I love saying it and it comes out of me clean as a bell — and then they asked my name, and I said my own name, the name that is mine, that is on the deed, that came down through four generations to land in my mouth, and I got it wrong, the way I always do.
I can say the name of a village I have lived in for eight days better than I can say the name of my own dead people, and the man nodded like that was normal, and maybe it is.
I waited. Numbers went up. I did the pricing thing, because there was nothing else to do with the front of my mind — I worked out what the morning was costing me, not in euros, the morning was free, the morning was the point, but in the other currency, the one nobody in that room was spending, the currency where a morning is worth what you could have built with it, and I had a house up a hill with men in it and I was down here in a filing cabinet watching a red number, and I priced it, and the number was high, and there was no counter I could take it to.
At some point I took out my phone. To not be the man staring at the wall.
And my thumb, doing its own thing, went down through the old mail, the way a thumb does, past the nothing, past the nothing, and stopped on a thread from last spring.
From a consulate. A subject line I had written myself.
The last message in it was mine, and there had been no answer, and there was not going to be one, and my thumb sat on it.
It did not open it. The thumb hovered, and then it went past, up, back to the top, and the screen at the ceiling said my number, in red, and I stood up so fast the whole bolted row of us swayed.
* * *
The clerk was behind glass with a tray-slot under it, and she was not unkind, and she was not interested.
Because I came to that glass with everything I have.
I came with the folder and the tabs and the smile, the real one, I am not a con man, the smile is real, I like people, I wanted her to have a nice ninety seconds of her morning, I wanted to be the good part of her shift, and I slid my sixteen euros of stamp and my photographs and my form with the woman's small capitals on it under the glass and I said the two friendly words I had, and she took the tray without looking up, and she did the thing, stamp, stamp, a date, a slip, she turned a screen to me and pointed where to sign and I signed, and she took my thumb — took it, my actual thumb, pressed it onto a pad and then onto a square, rolled it, and the ink went on cold and it did not come off, I found that out later in the bathroom, scrubbing, it does not come off in the little sinks, it wears off over a day — and she gave me a paper with a date on it, a date to come back, weeks away, and she said the date, flat, correct, and her eyes had already gone past me to the red number that was now one higher than mine.
That was it. That was the whole thing. She was not rude.
There was nothing to complain about, there was nobody to complain to, she had been administratively kind, and I stood at the glass one half-second too long waiting for the part where I become a person to her, the part that always comes, the part where the charm lands and the face changes and now we are two people and not a window and a number — and it did not come, and she said, gently, the next number, not to me, to the room, and I picked up my folder and I went.
In the parking lot I bought a coffee I did not need from a machine, and there was a woman near the machine, older, with her own slip still in her hand, waiting for someone, and I bought her one too.
I did. Eighty cents. I pushed the button and it dropped and I handed it to her and she was surprised and then pleased and she said something warm I did not understand and touched my arm, and that — that was the second transaction of the day that worked.
Sixteen euros to the State bought me a date weeks off and a cold thumb.
Eighty cents to a machine bought me a woman's hand on my arm for a second in a parking lot. I know which one I would do again.
* * *
I drove back up out of the fog, which had burned off, and the house was working when I got there — I could hear it before I could see it, the wet slap and scrape of men doing something to the inside of my walls, and I went up the track that crosses the neighbor's land, the track I am not to worry about the paper on, and I came into the yard, and the dog got up off the step and came over and leaned on my leg for exactly as long as it took her to decide I had no food, and then went back to the step.
The men were inside. In the low room under the vault, the big cracked ceiling curve that I had looked up at on my first morning and thought, the ceiling is cracked, they were doing careful slow wet work I could not name, and over their heads the good half of the roof was still on, the old flat tiles, and the gone half was a taut gray sheet letting a bruised light through, and I stood in my own doorway, which I had chalked eighty-two on that morning, and I asked about the roof.
I asked when the roof went on. It is my roof.
It is the one thing up there that everybody agrees is mine — the men, the paper, the neighbor, all of them, mine, the roof — and I asked when, and a man wiped his hands and said something I did not fully get but the shape of it was: not us.
Not this. That is not this paper. That is a different paper, in a different place, with different people, down in a building I have never seen, in a city, on a desk, and I asked whose desk and when and he lifted his shoulders, almost gently — nobody was unkind to me all day, I want that written down, it was the kindest day I have ever hated — and he said a thing that meant nobody knows, and I understood, standing there, that there was no one to ask.
That the roof I owned lived somewhere I could not go, in a language I could not read, waiting on a decision nobody could show me the shape of, and that the men in my house were allowed to be in my house because of one paper, and I was not allowed near my own roof because of another.
I chalked nothing else. There was nothing to chalk.
I stood in the yard as the light went long and I looked up at the half of my house that was covered and the half that was a sheet, and I priced it, I could not stop, I priced the whole thing, the house, the day, the date weeks off, the roof on the desk, and every number came out wrong, and the dog had gone to sleep, and somewhere below us the fog was already coming back up the valley for the night.
I owned a roof. I was not allowed to go near it. Both things had been true since the afternoon I signed.