CHAPTER 15
HE HANDS IT BACK
Malick
The seal was going off before its time. I had run it along the top edge two days back, where the intonaco stood away from the stone by the thickness of a coin, and already it had skinned and lifted at one corner, the way a scab lifts on a child who cannot leave it.
I put a flat hand under it. Not to press.
To read. The plaster breathed against my palm, out and in, the way a thing breathes when it is no longer married to what holds it, and I took the hand away and said nothing, because there was no one to say it to and it would not have helped the wall.
The oratorio was cold at that end even in September.
No sun on that face since spring. Whitewash over everything, three generations of it, brushed on thick the years nobody wanted a saint looking at them, and under it the thing that could not come off, because to take the lime off was to take it off.
Above me the vault held its crack along the crown, propped now, and above that the half of the roof that was still a roof kept the old flat tiles on and kept the rain where the rain belonged.
The other half was a sheet and a square of grey sky.
I had that much and I was grateful for it.
A wall with no roof is not a wall. It is a heap that has not finished.
I tapped the intonaco with a knuckle, low, along the springing. It drummed. Hollow, and hollow, and then a hand's width of solid, and then hollow again. I had mapped it already. I mapped it again, because the wall changes and I do not.
The site had been shut eight days. No crew, no lorry, no mallet going all afternoon.
Just me and the wall and the seal that would not behave, and the dog asleep in the good square of light by the door, and the quiet a building has when the machines are off — not empty, dense, a quiet with a weight to it.
I did not hear the car. I heard the dog. She came up off the floor and went out the door, and a minute later she came back in ahead of him, and she came to my leg first, the way she does, her head against the side of my knee before she had decided anything about the man behind her.
Mattia came in with a folder held out in front of him in both hands.
"They stamped it," he said. "Malick. They stamped the thing.
" He was lit up. He had been lit up all the way up the track, I could hear it under the words.
"Dario walked me through it. The office in the city, the — the ones over the wall now, the ministry ones.
It's their wall. On the paper it's their wall, and it says — okay, listen, this is the part —" He came across the floor too fast, holding the folder open so I could see a page I was not going to read from three metres in bad light.
"It says only a restorer touches a painted surface.
By law. Only the qualified one. So nobody else can — nobody puts a hand on this wall but you.
Not me. Not the impresa. Not some cheaper man from the city.
You." He stopped. The folder was still open in his hands and his hands did not know what to do next.
"I found the price of it," he said, quieter.
"You understand? I finally found the price of a thing. "
I wiped my thumb along my sleeve and there was whitewash dust on the sleeve that should not have been there, that had come off the wall onto me without asking, and I stopped moving for the length of one breath, and then I put the brush down on the banker's edge where it went.
"Come out of the light," I said. "You are in my light."
He came round. He was careful in the room, careful the way you are in a church that is not yours, though it was his, and he touched nothing, and he stood where I pointed him.
"Show me," I said, because he wanted so badly to be shown holding something, and I took the folder and I looked at the top page the way you look at a page you cannot read fast: the crest, the stamp, the article numbers set out in a column.
He was right about what it said. Dario had told it to him plainly for once.
The wall was the ministry's business now, jurisdiction taken the day the whitewash gave up the first square inch of colour.
"It is true," I said, and gave it back.
"So —" His face was doing a thing. "So that's good. That's — that's yours now. Nobody can take you off it."
"Nobody was going to take me off it."
"But now they can't. It's — Malick, it's protected. You're protected."
I put the flat of my hand on the wall. On the solid hand's width between two hollows, where the plaster was still holding the stone, still doing the one thing a plaster is for. "This," I said. "You want to know what the paper does for this."
"Yes."
"Nothing." I said it kind, because it was not his fault and I did not want it landing as a blow.
"The paper says no cheaper man's hand goes on this wall.
It does not say the wall stays on the stone.
Those are two different papers and only one of them exists.
" I tapped again, low, and it drummed, and I watched him hear it drum without knowing what he was hearing.
"The image is off. All along the bottom courses it is off the wall.
It hangs on the top edge and on the memory of glue that is not glue anymore, and it wants to come down. It does not care whose name is on it."
He looked at the wall as if it might do it while he watched. "So you fix the — you glue it back."
And this is where I forgot to be careful.
"You do not glue it," I said. "You cannot use a thing that grabs, because a thing that grabs is stronger than the plaster and it pulls a new crack where the old one was not, and now you have made a second wound curing the first. So you go the long way.
You face the surface first — tissue, a weak paste, laid on so it takes the colour's part and holds it steady while you work behind it — and you do not clean it, you do not touch the whitewash, you do not lift one flake of the lime that is hiding the saint, because the day you take the whitewash off you take the saint off with it, they are the same skin now, they have been the same skin for a hundred years.
So you leave him buried. You work blind.
You get behind the plaster from the edges and you feed lime grout into the gap where it drums, slow, a little, a syringe at a time, and you let it draw itself in on the suction the wall makes, you do not force it, forcing it blows the face, and then you press — soft, through the facing, through a cloth, with the flat of the hand — until the drum goes to a knock, and then to nothing.
And then you wait. It cures on its own time and you cannot hurry the time.
You go joint by joint, hollow by hollow, a hand's width in a day if the day is good, and the whole while the man you are saving you have never once seen, and will not see, because seeing him would kill him.
" I ran out of the sentence and stood in the quiet after it.
"You hold it on," I said, short again, the way I talk.
"That is the whole first year. You hold it on and you touch nothing you want to see. "
He had gone still. He was looking at me and not at the wall now, and he did not know his face was doing anything, and I knew what a man looks like when a thing has moved under his floor and he has not got the word for it, because I have watched him wear that exact face at the north wall with his hand going on and coming off.
I looked back at the plaster. It was the safer thing to look at.
"You could not pay a cheaper man to do that," I said.
"A cheaper man cleans it, because cleaning it is what shows.
He takes the whitewash off to show the client a saint, and the saint comes off on his sponge, and everyone agrees not to have seen it happen.
" That was Nella's wall and I did not say Nella's wall.
My maestro had a line about it — he is thirty years dead and he is right down the hall of my head every day — that the first skill is knowing what you are not allowed to touch, and that any fool can take a thing off a wall.
I did not say that either. I said, "This wall you go slow at, for nothing, for years, or you lose the painting.
There is one man in this valley who will do it that way and it is not because he is good.
It is because he is the last one who knows this lime, and the lime is the whole of it, and there is nobody coming after him who was taught it.
So." I picked the brush back up. "That is what your paper does for the wall.
It keeps the wrong hands off a thing that is falling off itself in front of me, and it does not slow the fall by one day. "
He was quiet a while. For him that is a long time.
"You're frightened of it," he said. Not unkind. Surprised, I think, to have caught it.
I did not answer that with a feeling. "Frost is coming in two months," I said. "Grout does not cure in frost. Lime does not cure in frost. Whatever I have not got holding by the first hard night, I lose, and I lose it to spring, not to a week." He heard it as weather.
That was when Nella came.
She came in out of the grey square with her stick and her opinion, both arriving before her, and Nella told the dog to get off and then fed her from her pocket in the same breath.
"So this is it," she said, before she was properly through the door.
"This is the famous wall. I want to tell you something, both of you, so you don't waste the young man's money.
There was never anything on this wall." She said it to the wall, at the wall, correcting the wall.
"In 'seventy-one this room was full of hay to the springer, we kept our fodder in here after the church stopped bothering with it, and I was in and out of it all that winter for my father, and I looked at that wall a hundred times, and it was white, and it was empty, and it was white.
" She rapped it with her stick where I had spent the morning.
"You've been sold a saint that isn't here. "
"You are probably right," I said.
"I am certainly right." She looked at me the way she has looked at me since I was a boy with too many opinions in short trousers. "Don't you humour me, Malick Ndiaye."
"I would not."
"You would. You've a face for it." She turned to go and then did not go, and pointed the stick at me, and I knew what was coming because it comes every time she is within a wall of me, and my eyebrows got there before she did.
"And don't think I've forgotten my bedroom," she said.
"Nine years that corner's been coming down and you told me cement and now look at it. You and your lime."
"I told you not cement," I said. "You did the cement."
"I did what the man said. The man from the city."
"I know." I did. I have watched that corner of her house drink water for nine years and I have not gone and taken the cement off and put it right, though it is a weekend and a barrow of putty and I know exactly what it wants, because she went with the city man over me and being right about it has been worth more to me than her dry wall, and I am not proud of that, and I do it anyway.
She knows. She went, satisfied, and Palla considered following the bread and then came back and put her head on my leg instead, and Mattia laughed, low, at all of it, and the laugh in that dead room was the warmest thing that had been in it in a hundred years.
"She's wrong," he said, when she was gone down the track. "Isn't she. There's a saint."
"There is a whole saint," I said. "She looked at him a hundred times and never saw him because he was under the white."
Then I did the thing I had come up early to do, before he came, that I had done at the bench in the dark and carried folded in the back pocket of my trousers all morning, waiting for the moment I would rather not have.
I took it out. The invoice. My hand, my figures, the same rectangle of paper that had gone across the table the other way in the summer when he first put money in my hand for this wall.
I put it down on the banker's edge and I slid it to his side.
"Take this back," I said.
He looked at it. He did not pick it up. His hand came halfway and stopped, and he had the same trouble with the hand that he had had with the folder, a man with nowhere to put a hand.
"What is it."
"It is the last one. There will not be another. For the wall." I kept my voice flat, the way I keep it for paper, because paper is the one thing in my life that has ever kept a promise. "The house you pay the impresa, they are inside, that is theirs. This wall you do not pay anyone. Not me."
"Malick." He had got the lit-up look wrong now, tried to bend it into something. "Bill me for the roof."
"I will."
"So — okay. So it's just the wall. You just don't want money for the wall."
"It is the wall."
"So what changes?" He said it with his hands out, the way he says everything, wanting the number, wanting the shape of the trade so he could stand inside it.
"You give me back a piece of paper, the site's shut anyway, you're handing me back money for work nobody's even doing — so what changes, what's different, what did you just do? "
And the answer was nothing, and I could see him deciding it was generosity, deciding I was being large with him, and it was not generosity.
But I did not say the thing under it. I did not look at him in the way a man looks when he has decided a thing about another man.
I looked at the wall, which was falling off itself, on a clock nobody could read, in front of the last man in the valley who knew how to hold it on.
"You are not paying me for this wall," I said. "Nobody is. That is why I can do it."