CHAPTER 11
THE HOLLOW
Malick
The oratorio kept the cold the way stone keeps it, which is longer than a man expects.
It was seven, and the yard outside was already warm, and I went in under the low door and the air stopped at my collar.
Whitewashed inside, floor to the spring of the vault.
Coat over coat. A hundred years of somebody keeping the damp off a wall nobody prayed to any more.
Deconsecrated before I was born. A store for a while, then not even that.
The vault held over my head, cracked along the crown the way the house's was, and the surviving half of the roof kept the morning off that side, and the gone half let a grey square of it down under the sheet. The floor was swept. I had swept it.
Ibu had found the first of it. A week back — a chip lifting at shoulder height, and he had put a thumb on it and called it mould and gone back to his phone.
He did not tell me for four days. A chip in a wall is not football.
When he did tell me it was over his shoulder, on his way to somewhere better, and I went and looked and said nothing to him about it, and I have been coming here before the crew ever since.
There is one hour. The sun clears the ridge and comes flat through the door for a while and rakes the wall sideways, and a wall lit sideways is not the wall it is lit square.
For about ninety seconds the flat white was not flat.
Ridges stood up out of it. Edges. A long shallow join running across at the height of a shoulder, then dropping, the way a man leaves off a day's plaster and comes back to it in the morning and the two days never quite forget each other.
Not damage. Somebody's arm, four hundred years back, laid on and left.
Then the sun lifted a hand's breadth and the wall went white and dumb again, and I had my ninety seconds, and I stood in the cold and waited for the rest of it to prove me a fool.
Palla had come in behind me and gone to my leg first, the way she does, and put her head against my knee, and then found the coolest flag in the floor and lay down on it and was no more use to anyone. She sleeps here now. It is the cold room. She has better sense than the men.
I wet a sponge and drew it once across the join, light, and the whitewash went translucent the way it does, and for as long as the water sat there was a shadow under it that had a shape.
Not a stain. A shape. It held while the wall was dark and it thinned as the wall dried and by the time the water was gone the shape was gone with it and I had a white wall again and a wet mark drying pale.
That is all the sponge is allowed to tell you.
You do not chase it with the sponge. The sponge is a question, and you ask it once.
So I asked the wall properly. A patch the size of a thumbnail, low, where nobody's eye would go, in the corner of a day-join.
The scalpel at a shallow angle, almost lying on the surface, and the loupe, and the light held low and to the side by my own hand so the shaved edge threw its own small shadow.
You take the whitewash off in flakes the size of nothing, one at a time, the tool ticking, and you go down through the coats and you count them by the ticking, and under the last of them there is a skin that is not whitewash and does not tick the same, and it is a colour.
A red. An earth red, the kind that comes out of this hill, the kind I grind in the bottega.
Laid thin, over a white ground, by a hand that knew the ground would still be white in four hundred years if the roof held.
The roof had not held. But the wall had, on that side, under the plaster, under the whitewash, in the dark, waiting for a sponge.
The whitewash came off on my hands the whole time, the way it does, chalking dry and pale into the cracks of my knuckles where the lime already lives and does not come out.
The near cousins of the coats I mix on the bench two hundred metres off, laid on here by men doing exactly what I do, keeping a wall from the wet, asking nothing of it.
My hands were the colour of the wall by the time I stopped, and I did not mind it.
The dust of it was on the backs of my hands and in the seams of them and I did not wipe it.
You do not wipe the wall onto your trousers in a room like that.
I knew what it was before the loupe was warm.
* * *
I did not do anything with knowing it. There is nothing to do with it.
You do not stand in a cold room and let a thing like that walk around inside you while the light is going up the wall and the day is coming on.
You put the scalpel down. You put the loupe in the roll.
You put a flat hand on the wall, which is not reverence and is not a thing I could stop doing if I tried — it is how I read; the hand tells me what the eye is lying about — and I laid the flat of my hand on the plaster below the patch, over the sound part, over the part I had not touched.
And I knocked.
Once, with a knuckle, the way you rap a door.
And the wall answered, and it did not answer the way a wall answers.
Plaster that is home to its stone gives you back a short dead note, no room in it, the stone taking the sound and keeping it.
This gave me a longer note. A little room in it.
Air behind. I knew the note before it finished.
Every man in this trade knows it and none of us likes to hear it.
I stood there with my hand on it, and the cold of the stone came up through the plaster into my palm and stayed.
A hollow is the plaster come away from the stone behind it.
Not fallen — away. A skin of four-hundred-year lime, with a picture on it, hanging off the wall on nothing, on habit, on the good luck of never having been touched.
And the thing that had kept it there, the thing that had held that skin flat to the stone all this time, was the hundred years of whitewash laid over it by men keeping the damp off a wall they thought was blank.
The whitewash was dry and pale on my own knuckles while I stood there and I did not brush it off.
I put my hand flat on the sound part and I knocked once more, to be sure, because a man can want a thing so hard he mishears a wall, and I would not have it be that I had misheard it.
It answered like a drum.
The crew heard me go quiet, later, and none of them asked me anything, which is the one good manners this trade has.
There is no clean word for what a hollow is.
It is the best thing you will ever find and it is a wound and it is both in the same knuckle, and you may never clean it, not a centimetre, because to take the whitewash off a detached skin is to take the skin off the wall, the picture leaving in your hand in flakes, and I have held that too.
Years ago, over the hill, a wall that came away in one whole sheet under another man's chisel — off in a single piece, flat and intact and completely dead, a picture and no wall left to own it.
I was young and it was not my chisel and I have never forgotten the sound the sheet made against the floor.
So you do not clean it. You hold it on. Edge-seal it, grout the void behind it a syringe at a time, get it married back to its stone before you let anybody look at the face of it.
Touch nothing you want to see. I stood in the cold with the arithmetic of holding it on already running, which parts first, which corner is worst, and under the arithmetic, where I do not go, there was the other thing, and I left it there.
Palla got up, turned around once, and lay back down.
* * *
You report it. There is no scene where you decide to.
I do not have that in me, I never have. You report it because the wall is not yours and it was never going to be yours.
I put the tools away first — the loupe back in the roll, the scalpel wiped and flat in its slot, the sponge wrung out on the sill.
That is not deliberation. That is putting the tools away.
The telephone works in one place on the track, up where the ground opens to the road, and everybody in this comune knows the spot and nobody has ever said so, and to stand there is to stand in view.
I have made every call of my life from there.
I stood in the sun with the warmth finally reaching me after the cold room and I gave a man at a desk an address, a description, a date.
What it was. Where it was. That I was the one working the house and had found it that morning.
Forty seconds of flat words down a bad line, and the man wrote it into whatever the man writes it into, and it was done, and a thing that had been in the dark and mine to find was now a thing with a file number, and the file would send a letter, and the letter would stop everything.
It stopped everything at eleven. The letter does not care what part of the job it lands on.
The men were inside on the sound work, the propping and the pinning, the lawful indoor work that was the reason they were allowed inside at all, and none of that has anything to do with a fresco, and it stops anyway, all of it, the moment the wall is on a desk.
The vault stays propped. The roof stays half on and half a grey square under its sheet.
The props stay bearing. And the men go home.
They took it the way this village takes anything to do with that office, which is to stand in the yard and drink coffee about it.
Somebody put the pot on the cement mixer's rim.
Somebody said the comune would have it sorted by Christmas and they all laughed, because this valley has been standing in yards waiting on that office since before Ibu was born, and it does not love them, and the joke is the same joke every time and it is still funny because it is still true.
Ibu was sour about it in the way of a boy who had counted on an easy week and been handed a shut site instead — annoyed at me, nearly, as though I had put the picture there myself to spoil his football.
He stood at the edge of the yard with his hands in his sleeves against a cold that was already gone from the air, wanting to be somewhere with a signal, and he asked me how long, and I told him nobody knew, which is the answer, and he took it as no answer at all, which is the boy.
Nobody knows how long. There is no number on it.
A wall that has hung on nothing for four hundred years is not a clock and does not tick down to anything, and the only men who could say when the office would move are the men who have never once, in this valley, in living memory, moved when you wanted them to.
I did not tell him what he had found with his thumb.
He would not have wanted it. By noon they were gone, and the tools were quiet, and the house was quieter than it had been since the middle of August, and I stood in a yard that had been full of men and was not, and there was nobody in it to hear how quiet it was but me.
And Mattia.
He came round from the kitchen side with a phone in his hand, because he had seen the men leave in the middle of a working day and a man who leaves in the middle of a working day is a man who has been sent home, and he wanted to know what it cost and who to pay to make it stop costing.
He asked me what was happening. I told him the wall in the oratorio was not stuck to itself any more — that the picture on it was holding onto nothing, and that nobody could touch it until the office said, and that this was the office saying.
I did not say picture like a thing you find.
I said it like a joint that has let go, because that is what it is.
He heard a problem. He is a good man and he heard a problem, the kind that has a price on it somewhere and a person you pay to make it go away, and he said, straight off, that he would pay for whatever it needed — the specialist, the scaffold, the whatever — that money was the one thing this house had never been short of.
He meant it kindly. He always means it kindly.
He stood in his own yard offering to buy it, and I did not tell him, and Palla went and leaned on his leg because he is soft with her about biscuits and she has worked that out.
That was the last thing anybody said, that day, in the last of that long warm end of the summer, and the wall in the cold room held its picture on by a hundred years of whitewash and a knuckle's worth of luck, and waited.
I had gone in at seven. I wet a sponge and asked the wall a question and it lied to me the way white lies, and then I put a flat hand on it and knocked, and the note had a room in it.
I had knocked once more, to be sure, because a man can mishear a wall he has waited on.
It answered like a drum. And I went to find a telephone.