PROVENANCE

CHAPTER 19

RAIN

Malick

The lift came off the wall at four, in the rain, and there was nobody to blame for the rain.

They had let us back on the site the day before.

The project had gone through; the terms had come down from the Soprintendenza; the fresco was reserved now to hands with the right paper on them, and the crew were inside the house again for the first time since the freeze, glad, loud, careless with their boots — in under the half of the roof that was still on, the gone half sheeted over their heads and cracking in the wind, and the vault over the ground floor still carried on its props, the centring kissing the crown where it had sat since August. The roof file was not with them.

The roof file was on a desk down the valley and would be there when the frost came.

Different paper. Different desk. A man learns not to wait on the two of them at once.

I had put the scratch coat on the north return that morning, before the sky closed.

Weeks in it — the raking out, the dubbing, the wall wetted down and wetted down again so it would not drink the mix and leave it hungry.

Good work. It was good work. And at three the cloud came over the ridge the colour of a bruise, and I stood under the eave and watched the first of it come down the face, and by four the render was on the ground.

Nobody's fault. There is nothing to argue with in rain. It does not answer letters, it keeps no forty-day terms, it does what it does and it does not know your name.

I am the reasonable one. I have been the reasonable one in every room I have ever stood in.

There was nowhere to put this, so I put it nowhere.

I sent the crew home. I coiled the hose.

I scraped the boards and stacked them square and washed the tools I would need tomorrow and set them to drain, and every motion was correct, and it was worse than shouting.

Palla came out of the dry under the van and leaned her weight against my leg and I let her.

The number was chalked on the door frame in his hand — fifty-three — high and cheerful, the way he wrote all of them.

I did not go up to the house. I went to the bottega.

* * *

The key lives on the third nail inside the frame, left of the latch, where it has hung longer than I have owned the place, and it was not there.

I stood in the wet with my hand going over the wood for it like a man reading a wall in the dark.

Second nail. Fourth. The latch. Nothing.

The lime was still on my forearms from the lift, drying white, cracking along the inside where I bent the arm, and my hands would not settle to the search, and I have unlocked this door ten thousand times and could not do it now.

I found the key in my own pocket in the end.

I had put it there myself, that morning, and forgotten.

I could not have told you when. A small thing. It undid me more than the wall had.

"Should I not be here?"

He was behind me. I had not heard the car, or I had and not counted it.

He stood at the edge of the light with the rain coming off the gutter between us, and he had followed me down from the house, and he was asking the one question I have never once had to answer, because nobody has ever stood at this door but me.

I did not answer it. I said, "It came off. In the rain."

"I saw," he said. "I'm sorry."

The door is low and I have ducked it every day for eleven years and I ducked it now and then I did not go in.

I stood back, my hand flat on the jamb, and I looked at him, and I moved my head.

He came. He had to duck too, less than me, and he came into the room and stood in the middle of it with his arms held a little out from his sides, careful of everything, touching nothing, and I shut the door on the rain.

It smells of one man in here. It has smelled of one man since before it was mine — cold ash and linseed and the sharp clean stone dust and, under it, my maestro, whose name is still on the box under the window and which I have never painted out.

Now it smelled of him too. Wet wool, and the outside on him, and whatever he washes with.

The room took his smell in one breath and did not give it back, and I felt that happen and had no word for what it did to me.

"You keep it warm," he said, looking, not touching. He had the sense not to touch. "Everything has a place."

"Nobody comes in here," I said. He looked at me. "You are the first one to stand in this room."

I did not say more than that. There is not more than that.

I said his name then. The wrong one, the one the village put on him. "Mattia."

"I want you here," I said. "Tonight. In this room.

I am saying it, so you hear me say it." My English is small.

It is the smallest thing I own — I have four words for a wall and forty for the weather and almost none for this, and that is right, because there is nothing to hide behind in four words.

"The wall is not why. I am angry and it is not you.

I will not touch you angry. I touch you because I want. Or not at all."

"I hear you," he said. Plain. No game in it, no making me climb for it. "Yes. I want to be here. Yes."

I crossed the room. I put my hand to the side of his face first, because I wanted to, and because a face is where you find out if a thing is welcome, and his eyes closed and the breath went out of him slow and even.

There is an ease in him I do not have and never will.

He turns his face into a hand and it costs him nothing.

I have to decide to be touched. He only has to stop moving.

I kissed him and he made the sound he makes, the one from the first time, low in the throat, and his hands came up and took two fists of my wet shirt and held — not pulling, only holding — and the rain was loud on the roof and the room was close and dark, and I stopped being angry.

Not slowly. Off. There was nothing left in me for the rain, or the wall, or the weeks of it in the mud. He had taken up all the room there was.

He pulled back an inch to look at me. "You're shaking," he said.

It was not a question and it was not soft, it was only true, and I did not tell him it was the lift, the day of holding my hands still on tools that would not answer.

I let him think what he thought. He put his mouth to the corner of mine, then under my jaw, then the line of my throat, slow, and I stood there and was looked at, which is a thing I do not know how to do, and did it.

"Off," I said, at the shirt, and he laughed against my mouth and helped me, and then his hands were on my buttons and quicker than mine, not shy, never shy.

He undresses without thinking about it. I got him out of his shirt and put my mouth to his throat and felt him swallow under it.

His skin was warm from the walk up. Mine was cold from the rain, and where I laid my forearm flat across his stomach he pulled the air in through his teeth and then pushed himself into the cold of it, wanting even that.

I got his belt. I looked at him while I did it, because I wanted to see his face do the thing it does, and it did it — the mouth open, the breath gone shallow, the want plain on him with nothing laid over it.

He is thirty-seven. He wants out loud, with his whole face, and no one has ever made him pay for it.

I took him in my hand and he said my name, wrong, the way he says everything, and it was the best thing I had heard all day.

He reached for me and I let him, his hand around me sure and unhurried, and I put my forehead down on his shoulder and breathed. Then I lifted his other hand off my chest and turned it over and looked at it in the low light. A good hand. Soft. The nails clean. A hand kept out of everything.

"What did these make," I said. I meant it small. I meant it as nothing, the way you ask a man where he is from and mean nothing by it.

He went still. "Nothing," he said. And then, because he cannot leave a silence alone, even now: "I'm thirty-seven and I can't — no.

Nothing. I never made anything." It came out flat.

He heard it land. I watched him hear it, and neither of us said a word after it, and I put his hand back against my chest where it had been and kissed him so he would not have to look at me.

There is a bench along the north side, waist height, worn pale where forty years of hands have leaned on it.

I cleared it with one arm — a jar, a rag, they went to the floor and I did not look — and he laughed, surprised, and I said "sorry," and he said "don't be," and got up onto it himself before I could decide whether to ask.

He sat on the edge of it and pulled me in by the waistband.

The ease of him. He has never had to want quietly. I have never wanted any other way.

I told him what I wanted. I said it badly, in the small words, with his knees against my hips and his breath already going.

"Like this. You on the bench. Me — I want to be inside you.

I am asking. Say it or say no." And he said "yes" before I had finished, and "yes" again, and reached back to a shelf where he had no business knowing anything was, and knew, and put the tin in my hand.

He had been in this room twice now and he misses nothing, the way I miss nothing, and that is a thing we have that I did not ask for and did not know I wanted until it was in my hand.

I warmed it between my fingers a long moment.

I would not bring the cold of the rain into him.

He watched me do it, his knee jogging, that need in him to fill the quiet, and he filled it — "you're careful, you're so careful, come here" — and I came there.

I opened him slow. I watched his face the whole time.

His head went back against the shelf. His mouth worked on words that would not come.

One hand had the lip of the bench. One hand lay flat on the back of my neck, keeping me close, keeping me looking.

And when the words came they were my name, wrong, over and over, and I did not correct it.

Then I was inside him and he went quiet all at once, the talk gone out of him, only the breath left.

It was the first time all day the room was quiet and it was him that made it quiet.

I held still and put my forehead to his, and we stayed like that, both of us not moving, the rain on the roof, the smell of the room gone soft and human around us — my maestro's smell and mine and his, and no other room in my life had ever held all three.

I felt more than I have the English for and I did not go looking for it.

He breathed my name once, a question, wanting me to move, and I did not, not yet, because for one more second I wanted to stay in the part of it that was only holding.

I moved when he told me to. He told me with his heel in the back of my thigh, with his hand flat on my chest and then closing, with my name.

I gave him what he asked for. He took it easy, unafraid.

I have spent my whole life being careful.

Here was a man who never once had to be.

I was not careful now. Nothing about it was angry.

"Stay," he said, near the end, the word coming apart in the middle of it.

"Stay." I did not know if he meant the minute or the rest of it, and I did not ask him which, because I did not want the answer to be the small one.

I stayed. I put my hand over the hand he had on the bench and it turned under mine and held.

He came with my name in his mouth and both arms around my neck and his face pushed into my throat, and I went after him, close behind, and for a moment there was no wall in the world I had to hold up.

We stayed on the bench a long time, past comfort, because neither of us moved to end it.

My heart was going and it was not from the work.

Something had been done to me that day that I did not choose — the rain, the wall, the weeks of it on the ground — and something had happened that night that I did, and the second one was louder, and I sat in the wreck of my own bench with a man breathing against my neck and felt, of all things, relief. That I had said it first.

He lifted his head. His face was open and undone and easy, and he looked at the room — at the trowels on their nails, at the sand in its grades, at the box under the window with a dead man's name still on it — and he did not ask about any of it.

He was a man who asked about everything, who filled every quiet with a question, and he looked at the loudest thing in the room and let it be quiet.

I was glad of him for not asking, and I did not say that either.

Outside the rain was going off. I would be back on the wall at seven, and the render would want doing again, by hands that— no. I did not think about that. Not tonight.

I had unlocked the bottega, and stood back, and let another man walk into it, for the first time in my life.