CHAPTER 17
FATOU
Malick
I went up to the house first, because a man goes and looks, and there is nothing to look at now but the standing of it.
The props held. The vault held above them, cracked and patient, going nowhere it had not been going since before I was born.
On the door frame the number stood in Mattia's chalk.
Fifty-seven. He had put it there in the dark, the way he does, and I left it, because the chalk is his.
I count in seasons. There is one season left before the frost and the wall will not cure in it, and no chalk on a door frame changes that, and I did not stand there thinking so.
I turned the van and went to my mother's.
She had a pot going that was not the Sunday pot, something plainer, onions gone soft and slow, and she was talking before the door was shut.
Somebody's cousin down in the valley had done a thing with a piece of land that she had said, two years ago, at this very table, would come to exactly this, and it had come to exactly this, and did I remember her saying it.
I said I remembered. I did not, but a man learns which of his mother's prophecies to have witnessed.
"Sit," she said, which I was already doing. "Your knees are younger than mine, you can sit or stand, it makes no difference to you. Mine have opinions."
The gourd was on the table by her elbow with the metal straw in it, and it steamed, and she drank from it the way she has drunk from it for weeks now, as though it had been on this table her whole life.
I had watched her take to it in a single afternoon.
She was smug about the speed of it still and mentioned it again — that she had it in a day, that Nella still would not touch it, that this told you everything about the two of them and always had. It was hers now. That was all.
She put a bowl in front of me before she sat, because a plate is how she starts a sentence.
"You look thin," she said. "Is that man feeding you or only paying you?"
"The site is shut," I said. "Nobody is feeding anybody. There is nothing to do at the house and I do not sit in his kitchen while he cooks."
She looked at me the way she reads a bill she suspects of an error, and let it go, and I let her let it go, and both of us knew the shape of what we were doing.
"Walk away from it," she said. Not for the first time.
She said it the way she says all the true things, without any softening on the front of it, a stone set down on the boards between us.
"It is a wound with a roof half off. You did not put the wound there and you cannot close it and it is not yours, and you go up there before light to look at a thing you are not allowed to touch, and I know you do, because you have done it since June, and it is making you thin.
" She drank. "Leave it to the American and his money. "
"The wall is right," I said.
"The wall." She said the word back at me flat, the way you hand a man back a tool he has picked up by the blade.
"The wall stood before you and it will stand after you and it does not need you thin.
You paid those people for years, Malick.
On a handshake, across the water, season after season, and I sat here and told you what a handshake is worth, and I was right.
" She was not gentle about being right. She has never once been gentle about being right, and I have never wanted her to be, which is a thing I would not say to her if you paid me. "So. Walk away."
I did not answer that with an answer. I asked about the cousin's land instead, and she knew what I was doing, and she went with me for two turns because the cousin's land was better than my house, and then she came back around to me the way water comes back to the low place in a floor.
"When are you going to stop working for nothing?"
I said the paperwork had changed. That the fresco under the whitewash was a thing only certain hands could touch now, that it was the register's business, and that this changed what the job was.
"That is not what I asked."
"It changes the job," I said again, which was true, and which was a joint I was raking clean of everything it had held so that she could see nothing in it. She watched me do it. She has watched me do it my whole life.
"You are managing me," she said. "You do it and you think I do not see it.
You edit my son down to the size you think my knees can carry.
I carried you up this hill on my back before you could walk, in August, uphill the whole way, and I did not complain once.
My knees are the only weak thing about me.
Do not decide for me what I can be told. "
"The site is shut," I said. "That part is not managing. That part is only true."
She drank from the gourd and set it down and did not push, and that was worse than pushing, and she knew it was worse, and she let it be worse.
My mother is not a fragile woman. She is a joint that was raked out clean forty years ago and left open to the weather on purpose, because she would rather take the frost every winter than be pointed shut by anybody's hand, including mine, and she keys to nothing she has not chosen, and she was not going to key to a soft answer at her own table.
* * *
We went out to the grave in the middle of the day, which is a Tuesday thing and not a pilgrimage, twenty minutes and the van left running at the wall because the battery is old.
She has wanted a job done at it for a year.
The kerb has moved — one corner has taken up the frost and dropped, and the stone sits a finger proud on one side now, and it offends her, and she has asked me to reset it four times, at Ferragosto and after Ferragosto and twice since, and I have not done it.
I crouched to it, because a man reads with his hands, and put a thumb along the joint where the bed had let go.
It was a clean fault, no rot in it, no salts, only the ground breathing under it one winter too hard.
I knew exactly what it wanted — the corner lifted, the old bed struck out, a fresh one run and the stone floated true — a barrow of lime and an afternoon and it would sit for another twenty years.
I took the thumb off it. I did not do it today either.
I told her I would bring the barrow up. I have told her I would bring the barrow up before, and she has heard me say it before, and we have both watched the words go up the hill without a barrow behind them.
"You point the whole valley," she said. She was not looking at me. She was pulling a weed she had decided was a personal enemy. "You will go and reset a dead stranger's coping for a case of wine and you will not reset your own father's for me."
"I will bring the barrow up," I said.
"You said that in August."
There was nothing in that I could rake clean, so I let it stand, and she let it stand, and we stood at it a while.
He mixed lime his whole life and it took his lungs in the end, the way it takes them, slow, a fact with a cause and no villain in it, and I have never once complained of it, because a man does not complain of the thing his father was.
In 1997 he was up at Assisi on the reconstruction, mixing for a gang of men who never learned his name, hot lime in a valley of collapsed vaults, and he came back grey around the mouth every night that winter and got up every morning and went back.
My mother knew all this. I did not tell her any of it.
It was in the ground under our feet and it did not need saying and I did not say it.
I only thought of his hands — white to the wrist at the kitchen table, the lime dried into the cracks of them, turning a cup, and nothing else, no wall in it, only the hands and the cup and the white — and then I stopped thinking of it, because it was mine and it did not want handling in front of her.
"I would have had the American's money," she said suddenly, "and let him restore his own wound, and I would have taken you to the sea with it before my knees were finished.
That is what I would have done with all of it.
With a man's whole self." She straightened up with the weed in her fist. "But you are your father.
You would rather a thing be right than be yours.
He was the same and it killed him and I loved him and I would tell him the same thing I am telling you, which is that being right is not warm at night. "
"The van is running," I said.
She laughed, which I had wanted, and had aimed for, and she knew I had aimed for it, and she went with it anyway because she is not too proud to be steered when the steering is toward the van and away from the stone. We left the corner dropped. I will bring the barrow up.
* * *
Back at her kitchen she gave me food I had not asked for, because that is not a thing you ask for from her, it is a thing that happens to you, and while I ate she found the last nail and drove it, in her own time, unhurried, the way she does everything that matters.
"That neighbour of yours," she said. "Marsili.
He carried my shopping on Thursday. All the way up, the heavy bag, the water and the flour, and he would not put it down until it was on my counter, and he asked about my knees.
" She said it warmly. There was nothing under it to find, because there is nothing under it, and I know there is nothing under it, and that is the whole of the trouble with the man.
"And he remembered what I told him. In June I told him it was the left one and on Thursday he asked after the left one.
Nella's own son does not remember which knee. He is a good boy, that one."
I ate.
"You do not like him," she said, "and I have never understood it, because he has never done a thing to you, and he is the only one of them under fifty who still comes up this track, and he is kind to the dog when there is nobody to see him be kind to the dog, and that is the true test of a man, Malick, whatever you think. "
"He is a good neighbour," I said, which was true, and complete, and cost me the roof of my mouth to say level.
She heard nothing wrong in it, because there was nothing wrong in it that a mouth can carry.
I sat at my mother's table and watched her be glad of him — the flour carried up, the knee remembered, the whole warm renewable gift of it — and I said nothing, and I am not going to say anything, not this winter and not next, because there is no shape I could put it in over her food that would not sound like I was taking a thing away from a woman with bad knees who has few enough good afternoons.
She likes him. It is not a mistake. He is likeable.
And I ate her food and let her keep the afternoon.
Then Nella came up, of course, because Nella smells food across the whole comune the way a wall smells rain, and she stood in the door and eyed the gourd on the table as she has eyed it since August, the way you eye a dog you have decided is going to bite you eventually, and she did not touch it, and she made sure I saw her not touch it.
Then the two of them were off before Nella had her second foot in the door — the sagra boards, whose thing had gone first, whose plate had come back empty and whose had come back with a corner cut off it out of politeness and no more.
Neither of them will ever say the true thing, which is that my mother's is better and Nella knows it and would go in the ground before she said so, and my mother would go in the ground before she admitted she has counted every empty plate for forty years, which she has, and which she could give you by name.
They are two joints that have been open to each other's weather since before I could walk, and they will die within a season of each other out of spite, and each of them has decided the other one will go first.
"The boy came for money again," my mother said to Nella, meaning Ibu, changing the subject the way you change a dressing, and Nella had a thing to say about boys and money, and I was, for a while, not the thing on the table, and I let that last as long as it would.
At the door my mother took my sleeve. Not my hand. She does not do hands. My sleeve, the way she checks a hem.
"Stop working for nothing," she said again, low, so Nella would not have it. "Whatever the paper is doing. You do not have to be the one who is right about that house."
"The site is shut," I said.
She let go of the sleeve. "That is not an answer."
And it was not. I drove down with the light going long across the olives, and the number was still on the door frame when I passed the house, fifty-seven in a foreigner's chalk, and I did not stop, because I had already been once, and a man who goes twice in a day is a man his mother is right about.