CHAPTER 18
VERSAMENTO
Matias
Ibu rode down with me as far as the valley road, thumb going the whole time, building a case out loud that his uncle was a nineteenth-century man — not an insult, the way he said it, more a weather report, a thing you learned to dress for — and he had evidence, he had so much evidence, the man ground his own chisels, the man wore actual reading glasses and hid them, the man counted time in weather and seasons and never in weeks like a normal person, and I said maybe seasons were how you were supposed to count when you weren't going anywhere, and Ibu looked at me the way eighteen looks at anybody over thirty who tries, and went back to his phone.
I love that kid. He got out at the bottom of the hill without saying thanks, which is its own kind of thanks, and I sat at the junction with the blinker going and watched him lope off toward wherever eighteen goes on a Wednesday, and then I turned the other way, down into the valley, to the one place around here with a parking lot big enough that a man could sit in it and not be looked at.
Because that was the errand. Not the groceries.
The groceries were the cover, and I'm good at cover, I've been running cover on myself since I got off the plane — coffee for men who'd already had coffee, offering to pay for gravel, the whole bright open American thing that gets you a seat and a smile and never once gets you asked a real question — and I parked at the far end, past the trolley bay, nose out toward a field that had already been cut, gold stubble going brown, a heat shimmer coming off the tarmac between me and the doors.
People went in and out with bags. A woman loaded a car with three kids orbiting her like she had her own weather.
Nobody looked at me, which was the point, which was the only reason a man drives twenty minutes down a hill he doesn't need to leave: a car with the windows up is the one room in this whole province where nobody can see your face, and I needed a room like that, and I'd known I needed it before I could have told you why.
I turned the radio off. I took the slip out of my shirt pocket where it had been all morning making a small stiff square against my chest, and I looked at it.
I'd gone back for it. That's the part I'm not going to dress up.
The little clip of them was still down on the bench by the bottega door, out in the yard — it had sat there under the tissue box the day I carried the box up, the day he took the one slip out of my hand and put it away himself and never came back for the rest, and the rest just stayed on the bench in the weather with nobody minding it.
I did not go inside. I have never once seen the far side of that door and I did not see it this time; you do not go into a man's room.
I stood on the yard side of it where a man is allowed to stand, and I peeled one off the clip, and I put it in my pocket, and I left.
I want that on the record too: nobody was out there, nobody handed it to me, I took it.
The word was versamento.
* * *
I typed it into the phone and held the phone up against the sun because the screen goes dead white in that light and you have to cup it with your whole hand like you're lighting a match, and the signal came and went the way it does down there, one bar, no bars, one bar, and the app thought about it and gave me payment.
Okay. Payment. Fine. Payment is a thing that happens all day, a man pays his phone bill, a man pays for lime, I pay for everything, it's practically my hobby, and I sat with payment for about four seconds before I made it give me another one, and it gave me deposit, and I liked deposit less, deposit has a floor under it, deposit is the first of a series, and I pushed it once more and it gave me pouring.
Like pouring a wall. Like pouring anything.
Payment, deposit, pouring — I said them out loud in the hot car, three words for one word, and made a joke, I said, well, at least it's not all three at once, and the joke landed nowhere, on nobody, on a steering wheel, and I laughed at it anyway because that's the deal I have with myself, I laugh first.
Here is what I did next: nothing. For a long time.
I put the phone face down on the passenger seat.
I put the slip in the door pocket, down in the door pocket with the parking receipts and the dead pen, out of my hand, out of the light, filed, done, and I looked at the stubble field for a while and let the car get hotter, and then my hand went down into the door pocket on its own and took the slip back out, because that's the whole trick a thing like that plays on you, it's not heavy, you can put it down anywhere you like, and your hand just goes and gets it.
I picked the phone up and looked at the slip again — there was a number on it, eight hundred, and a date, and the date said the year and I read the year the way I read everything here, as a fact with no sentence around it, a number floats free when you can't read the words holding it in place — and I put the phone face down again.
There was a way to make this small. I tried it on.
A man like Malick keeps his affairs at a bank in the valley, of course he does, everybody does, and he'd had a slip, an old slip, in a drawer, and it had ended up clipped with others, and it meant a phone bill, a supplier, a thing that was over.
I tried that story on and it was thin. I tried a thinner one, that it was a one-time thing, a single old slip that meant nothing, except a single slip doesn't get itself clipped to a stack of its brothers in a drawer that a man keeps swollen shut.
I tried the one where it was somebody else's entirely, a name on it I couldn't read, and that one was the thinnest, it came apart in my hands before I finished it, because I could read enough, I could read a word and a number and a year, and a word and a number and a year is a sentence in any language, it just doesn't tell you who — and I did not want a who.
That was the truth of it, sitting in that oven of a car.
I was not afraid of the word. I had the word.
I was afraid of the name that went with it, and I was sitting very still so it wouldn't come, the way you sit still in bed at four in the morning so the thing you've remembered will forget you back.
Around me the afternoon just kept happening.
The woman got her three kids into the car.
Two men stood by a van and argued about something with their hands, cheerfully, at length, the way men here can argue about nothing for an hour and buy each other coffee after.
A dog I didn't know trotted the length of the trolley bay on business of its own.
It was a completely ordinary Wednesday down there in the valley, everybody's small true errands getting run, and I was up at the far end of it in a hot car with a piece of paper, doing the one thing I am worst at in the entire world, which is holding a thing without immediately trying to pay for it, fix it, host it, cover it, fill the silence it made.
I couldn't fill this one. There was nothing to put in it.
So I just sat in the hole and let it be a hole.
And the thing is I knew where to go to find out.
I could drive back up the hill and put the slip on the bench and say, in my terrible nothing-Italian and his terrible nothing-English and the pidgin of hands we've built between us, what is this, and he would tell me, because he tells me true things, he tells me what the frost does and where to stand, and he has never once lied to me about anything I asked.
That's why I didn't ask. You don't hand a true thing like that to a man and make him say it.
I put the phone face down. I picked it up.
The phone rang under my hand and I nearly dropped it, and it was Dario, which was almost funny, the geometra calling in the middle of me not being brave, and I said his name too warm, the way you grab a life raft, and he was calling about the file, the seismic report, there was a date he needed me to hold, a window, the report had to go up the valley to the right desk before something else could move, and I said yes, and yes, and whatever you need, and I meant it, and none of it went in, and while he was still talking about the report I heard myself do it.
I said, hey, dumb question, what does versamento mean.
And Dario, who was not asking, who was three sentences deep in seismic classifications and had no reason on this earth to wonder why the American wanted a banking word, said, oh — payment, a transfer, money going in. Why.
Saw it on a form, I said. Some form. You know how it is, everything's a form.
Ah, he said. And went back to the report.
That was it. Nine seconds, maybe. I lied to a man who had not asked me a question, badly, for free, and he let it go because he had a real job and I did not, and I sat there with the sun cooking the dashboard and understood that I had just chosen, on purpose, with a witness who didn't even know he was one, not to know a thing I already half knew.
My father did something once — paid off something over years, a car, a debt, a favor to a cousin, I never got the shape of it, he just paid it, quietly, monthly, and never said, and my mother only found out at the end, and I remember thinking as a kid that was a strange way to love somebody, in silence, without ever putting it on the table where it could be thanked.
* * *
I put the phone face down on the passenger seat and I did not get the groceries, and I drove back up out of the valley with the radio off and the windows down now because the sun had come around, and the road does that thing where it climbs and the olives start and the air changes, gets that dry green weight to it, and I went up my own track — my track, the one that gets me to my own front door, which crosses a field that isn't mine, which everybody knows crosses a field that isn't mine, and it's fine, it's a handshake, between friends we don't need paper — and Valerio was out in it, down the far end, doing something to a fence with his sleeves pushed up, and he lifted a hand to me across the grass and I lifted one back, because I always do, because you always do, because the man opened his table to me my first week and I have been lifting a hand to him ever since and it costs nothing and it is the easiest transaction I have here.
The house came up on the right the way it always does, low and honey-colored and half-finished and mine, the props inside holding up a ceiling I'm not allowed to touch, the good half of the roof still on with its old flat tiles, the gone half under its sheet, and every single time I come up this track some part of me still does the little lift it did the first day, that's mine, I bought that, and every single time now the lift comes with a small drag under it I've been pretending is just the grade of the hill.
I drove past the house and up to where you park and I sat for a second with the engine off, the tick of it cooling, a bird somewhere, the enormous evening quiet of a place that does not care what you did in a car.
I was already, God help me, pricing it. That's the reflex, that's the only grammar I've got — I was working out, in my head, without deciding to, what an apology would run me, an apology for a thing nobody had told me about, how you'd even do it, what you'd put on the table, what the number would even have to be — and I couldn't find it, there was no figure that sat right, the arithmetic kept coming up wrong the way arithmetic never does for me, and I got out of the car.
The chalk was on the window ledge where I keep it.
I did the arithmetic in my head the way I do it every morning, cheerful, automatic, the one useful thing my idle hands are allowed, and I chalked it on the door frame, in digits, in my own hand: 55.
Fifty-five days. I've been counting them down to a party since the second week, the oil and the fires and the wine, a good round reason to make marks, and everybody smiles at the chalk and nobody's ever asked me why I do it and I've never once wondered myself.
Then I went in through my own front door, and there was a crack up the jamb at about eye height, an old one, healed-looking, and glued across it a little plastic tab, two plates, a crosshair — they're all over the house, I found them my second day looking for the fuse box, dozens of them, every crack in the place wearing one, and each one written on, pencil, dates, going back and back in one man's small square hand — and I went in past it and did not turn my head.
I did not go and read them. I have never once gone back and read them.
They were nice, I'd thought, the first day.
It was nice of somebody to have kept an eye on the place.
I had put the phone face down on the passenger seat a mile back, and I had driven the rest of the way with the radio off.