CHAPTER 12
THE INVOICE, OUT LOUD
Matias
The house had been quiet for two days, and I could not get the hang of it — you would think a man who had bought a ruin on the far side of an ocean so he could hear himself think would know what to do with silence, but I did not, I kept moving through the rooms like I was hunting for the switch that turned the noise back on, offering coffee to a kitchen with nobody in it, and I had made a pot anyway, out of habit, out of hosting, and it went cold on the stone while I stood there holding the little cup and not drinking it.
Two days of no crew, no radio, no lorry on the track, no wooden mallet going all afternoon in a rhythm I had started to sleep to.
A house is loud when men are curing it. A house that stops is a held breath, and I had paid for the breath, and I could not let it out.
Dario had come and gone before eight. He dropped the month's paper on the table the way you set down a thing you are sorry about, apologized twice for the fax machine, once for the comune, and left, and now the whole of it was fanned out in front of me — stamps, a form with a red header, three pages I could not read a single word of — and the thing about not being able to read is that it does not feel like being blind, it feels like being very small at a table of grown-ups, everyone kind, nobody explaining, everyone certain you will understand it later.
Palla was asleep against the cement mixer, which had not turned in two days and made a good warm shade, and I had to step over her to get to the window, and she did not move, she was a professional.
I had bought her biscuits. The wrong ones — I found out later they were the wrong ones — from the man at the tabaccheria who sold me the wrong everything with such warmth that I kept going back for more of it.
She was not my dog. Everybody had told me, gently, four different women on four different afternoons, that she was not my dog and would not be anybody's.
I bought the biscuits anyway and I put them where she would find them and I did not say anything about it to anyone.
I had chalked the number on the door frame that morning the way I chalked it every morning, sixty-eight, in the dark before the light came over the ridge, because it was the one thing my hands were allowed to do that no form and no man could stop, and then I stood in the doorway with the chalk dust on my fingers and thought: sixty-eight what.
Sixty-eight days to a party, they kept telling me, oil and fires and wine, it would be wonderful, I would love it.
It did not feel like a party from where I was standing. It felt like a number going down.
Then the door I had left open had a man in it.
Malick did not knock — there was no crew, no van doors, no radio, so he arrived the way weather arrives, and I heard him before I turned because his boots knew this floor and mine did not.
Palla got up off the mixer and went to his leg and put her head against it, and he reached down and put a hand on her without looking. He had a paper in his hand.
"Coffee," I said, "I made coffee, sit, it's cold now but I'll — sit, there's more, there's always more," and I was already reaching for the pot before I heard myself, the reflex of it, the same reflex that had me buying biscuits for a dog that would not be mine, the need to put something in a man's hand the second he came through a door so that the coming-through was a thing I had hosted and not a thing that had happened to me.
He did not sit. He did not take the coffee.
He did not wave it off either, which would have been a small no I could have worked with — he simply let it go past him the way he let a lot of things go past him, and crossed to the table, and did the thing he did, the thing I had watched him do to a wall and to a door arch and to the bonnet of a van and had not yet learned how to read — he put a flat hand on the paper, flat, for a second, like he was taking its temperature — and then he set it down on top of my pile, squared to the edge, and stepped back.
"The week," he said.
An invoice. A number, a date, a stamp, in the language I did not have.
I reached for my phone to run the camera over it, to make the words turn into words, and he said, "Wait," and I waited, and nothing in the room had happened yet, and I remember thinking that was a strange power, that a man could still a whole kitchen with one small word and a bill.
* * *
He talked. Malick did not make speeches — I had learned that much in three weeks, he was a man who answered a question about the sky with a fact about frost and left you feeling you had been told everything there was — so when he started to talk on purpose, three things he had clearly carried up the track already built, in an order, I shut up, which for me is the whole of the work.
"I want you," he said. "That is the first, and I say it first, so it is said."
Flat. Not soft, not a thing I could answer with my body leaned across a table, just set down the way he had set down the invoice, a true thing squared on top of the pile.
I did not do anything. For once in my life I did not do anything with my hands or my mouth.
Somewhere in me a door I had been politely pretending was a wall swung open, and I stood very still so he would not hear it.
"Second." He was looking at the wall behind my head now, not at me, and I understood he was not being shy, he was reading something off it the way he read everything.
"There is a sentence people say about this.
It does not get said about you. You get in a car, you go home, it does not follow you across the water.
It gets said here, and it stays said, and it does not get said about me either.
" He paused. "It gets said about Fatou. It gets said about Ibu.
So I do not spend it. It is not mine to spend. "
I want to be honest about what I heard, because the reader is going to be ahead of me here.
I heard a no. A beautiful, careful, unarguable no, and underneath the no I heard a problem, and my hands were already moving toward it before my chest had caught up, because that is what I am, somebody hands me a hard thing and I go for my wallet before I go for my heart, and it had never once failed me.
Thirty-seven years and there had never been a room where the thing could not be made clean if a man was willing to pay for the cleaning.
My mother pressing folded money into a hand in a doorway in a city I have spent maybe nine weeks of my life in, the hand closing, the door closing, everyone lighter for it, and it was that easy.
"Third," he said, and here he stopped looking at the wall and looked at me. "Not while you are paying me."
That was all. He did not say never. He said not while, and I have gone over it since, the not and the while, two small words doing the work of a hinge, and I did not hear the hinge, I heard the door, and I went straight at it.
"Then we take you off my books," I said.
"Look — we run it through an agency, a firm, there are companies that do exactly this, I have used them, three of them, you invoice the firm and the firm invoices me, it is not me paying you, it is a company paying a contractor, it is paper, it is one more piece of paper in a house that is already drowning in it—"
"It would still be your money," he said.
"But not my hand." I was leaning in. I thought I had it. I thought I had found the seam and gotten a nail under it. "That is the whole thing, no? The sentence, the thing people say — if it is not my hand handing it to you, then there is no sentence, then it is just two firms and a bank—"
"Mattia." He said it the way the whole village said it, the wrong name they had handed me on the second day. "They only ever look at the hand."
And there was nothing to say to that, so I said nothing, and it sat in the room with the invoice, and I tried, I want you to know I tried, to find the angle that got under it, because there is always an angle, and I ran three of them in my head one after another — a gift, a wage, a loan called something else — and every one of them ended at his hand, at the fact of whose hand it was, and I could not get around the hand, and I had never in my life met a problem I could not get around by being more generous at it.
Under all of it — under the pricing, under the leaning in, under the earnest little engine of me that will not stop trying to make a thing clean — there was something I would not have admitted if you paid me, and I had money, so that is saying something.
I was glad. He had said I want you out loud in my own kitchen and whatever else was true, that was true now, it was a fact in the room, a paper on the table, and I had been circling it for three weeks like a man who cannot read the sign standing under the sign, and I was so glad the sign was finally there in a language I understood that I could have laughed, and laughing would have been the worst thing I could possibly have done, so I held it behind my teeth and I let the invoice sit.
Neither of us picked it up. I could not read my own bill and he knew I could not and neither of us said so, and it lay there getting a damp corner from the table, for what felt like an hour and was maybe three minutes, two grown men and a piece of paper that neither of them would touch.
* * *
"Come," he said finally, and I went, because by then I would have gone anywhere he said come, and that is its own kind of problem and I knew it and I went anyway.
The north wall in the late sun. Even I could see it now, three weeks in — the way the light came around the wall and not onto it, the cold side, the side that never got the day.
He had raked out a joint that morning, a long clean open channel where the old stuff had come away, and it sat there empty, and he had not filled it.
There was a bucket at his foot with the lime skinned over on top like milk left out on a counter.
"You didn't finish it," I said. "It's a beautiful day, no? You had all of it, the whole day, nobody here, nothing to do but this—"
"Frost."
"There's no frost, it's September, it was thirty degrees at noon, I—"
"Not today. Coming." He crouched and tipped the bucket so I could see the skin on it, the way you show a child the flame and do not let him near it.
"You put it in now, it looks fine, it looks like a wall.
The cold gets into it before it is hard.
It does not cure. It goes worse than the empty joint, because the empty joint is honest and this is a lie that looks like a wall.
" He set the bucket down. "So. Everything stops.
Nothing cures. We wait for spring. You do not fight it, there is no way to win it, you wait, and in the spring it is still here and so are you. "
He said all of it the way a man tells you why a bucket is going back in the van, because that is what he was telling me, he was not teaching me anything, he was loading up to go home.
He lifted the bucket. There was a van in the yard that was not his, the crew's, left behind when the site shut, and he took the loan of it the way he took the loan of every single thing that was not money — the food, the help, a hand up onto the scaffold once when he thought no one saw — without a flicker, without a thank-you that cost him a thing, and he loaded the bucket into the back of it and shut the door on it.
"Frost," I said. I said it back to him, flat, the one syllable, foreign in my mouth the way every word in this valley was foreign in my mouth, turning it over, and I watched his face to see whether I had it wrong.
He did not correct me. He had corrected my chalk once, and my grip on a brush once — but he let this one word stand, because I had it right the first time, and letting it stand was the only thing he ever said about it.
Then he went back through the kitchen for his keys, and he stopped at the table, and he picked up the invoice.
He looked at me while he did it. I had already opened my mouth — I had the agency loaded again, the firm, the clean paper, I was going to try it one more time from a better angle, I always have one more angle — and he saw it coming across my face before I got a word of it out.
"Don't decide what I can live through," he said, and put the invoice back in his pocket.