CHAPTER 21
MATTIA
Malick
The last warm evening of the year does not tell you what it is. You find out the next morning, when the cold has come down off the ridge in the night and stayed, and you count back and understand that the one before it was the last, and nobody who sat at it knew.
We sat at this one not knowing. It was somebody's name-day, or the end of somebody's harvest, or only that the weather had held and a woman had said come, come tonight while it lasts — a long table in a yard down the valley, the boards laid end to end and dressed in whatever cloth each house had brought, plastic chairs and a bench and three good chairs carried out for the three oldest, and half the comune along both sides of it in the blue going-dark, with the swifts still up over the roofs and the first bat cutting under them.
Nella was running it. She had made the seating in her head that afternoon and it was wrong, the way it is wrong every year, and she had put a man next to the cousin he has not spoken to since the spring and put the deaf one at the loud end, and nobody moved, because to move is to tell Nella she was wrong and no one at that table had the evening in them for what that costs.
I sat where I have sat for as long as there has been a table in that yard.
I passed the bread down my side without being asked, because I know which hands reach and which wait to be reached to, and I moved the salt before the deaf one had to ask twice for it, and I kept half an eye on the low end where the boards meet, because that join has rocked at every meal in that yard since the boards were cut and a plate set on it at the wrong moment will go.
I have been reading this room since before some of the people in it were born.
It is not a thing I do on purpose. It is only that I see where a table is about to move.
Fatou had her torta on the stone at the near end, and Nella had her thing two plates down from it, and the whole length of the table knew which was which and told neither of them.
Palla worked the underside of it from one end to the other like a woman with a job, unhurried, taking a crust here and a knee against a shin there, and she came to my leg last and stayed, the way she does, and I made nothing of it and put my hand down once into the warm heavy head of her and took it back.
Somebody had brought the wrong wine — a heavy red for a night that wanted the light one — and it turned out to be the best wine anyone had drunk in that yard in years, and the man who brought it would not say where it came from, and that was better than the wine.
Ibu was down at the young end being eighteen.
He had his phone up over the table taking the noise of it, and Fatou told him twice to put it away and he told her, in the dialect of this valley, quick, all vowels, that she did not understand, and she answered him in Wolof that she understood him better than he understood himself, and he grinned and did not put it away, and she was not really angry, and everyone near them was enjoying her not being angry.
It was a good table. There was no unkindness on that ground you could have laid a finger on.
It was one of the good ones, and the light going the way it goes here, all at once off the ridge and then a long slow give in the valley under it.
I have sat at this table when the boards were newer and the man who brings the boar up every year brought it up green, the first time, sure it was a story nobody had heard yet.
Ten years. More than ten. The three good chairs come out for whoever the three oldest are that season, and the faces in them change and the chairs do not, and one year one of the chairs will come out for me, if the knees that carry me to a wall last that long, and some boy I have not met will move the salt down before the deaf one has had to ask twice.
You learn the rock in the boards. Then you are the boards.
Valerio was pouring. He came down the boards the way he always does, a bottle in each hand and a word at every glass, unhurried, glad to be there and making everyone glad he was, and when he reached the middle of the table where the American sat he stopped, and he filled the glass, and he told the table who the American was.
I had heard him tell a man to a room before.
I have been told to a room by him. This was the warm one, the good one, the one he means — he told the table about Mattia.
How the Boccali had gone from these very hills, four lives ago, and gone all the way to the other side of the world, and how the boy had come back — he called him a boy, and Mattia is not far off forty, and no one minded — come all that way back to the house his own people had left, to put a roof back on it, to make it stand again.
He said the name like a gift he was handing back across a hundred years.
He said it was a fine thing. He said the hills know their own and always take them back in the end, and he lifted the glass he had just filled a little toward the American, and half the table lifted theirs, and it was a lovely thing to say and every word of it was wrong.
I passed the bread. I was thinking about the wall.
There is a lift booked for the morning and I had to be on the scaffold by seven to see the shoring timber right before the crane came, and I was running the order of it behind my face while Valerio talked, and I had no intention in the world of doing anything but eat and go up the track to my bed.
It was not mine to correct. A man does not stand up at a table and take a compliment out of another man's hand.
And Mattia was smiling at it, the way he smiles at everything, easy, up from the chest, already halfway to lifting his own glass back.
Then he put the glass down without drinking, and he stood.
* * *
I have watched a man burn down his own seat.
It is not a thing you see often and you do not forget it once you have.
He stood at the middle of a table that had just taken him in, with the good wine in front of him and the whole warm length of it turned up to him kindly, waiting for him to be glad, and instead he set his hands flat on the boards and he was not glad.
He said, "You have called me Mattia since August. You never asked.
My name is Matias. My mother is from Buenos Aires, my Spanish is better than my English, and my great-grandfather left these hills in 1913 — and until March of last year this country would have handed me a passport for a man I never met, sight unseen.
Malick was born up the road. He had one year, at eighteen, to ask for the same thing, and he had to prove every day of it.
Nobody gave either of us anything. He asked. I just sat down."
He had my name in his mouth in front of forty people and I sat with my hand flat on the table and did not lift it.
It went out over the table and it landed on nobody.
They did not turn on him. They did not turn to me.
There was a silence of about four seconds, and in it I could hear the generator down by the wall, and a chair-leg find a soft place in the ground, and a moth going at the one bulb strung over the boards, ticking against it and coming back.
Four seconds is long enough to set a mix.
It is long enough to know whether a wall is going to move.
And every person along both sides of those boards understood, without conferring, without a look passing that you could have caught, that a guest had said a hard thing at a happy table and that the kind thing, the gracious thing, the thing you do for a man who has drunk too fast in a place he does not know, is to let it go by.
Nella did not rescue it. Fatou did not. Nobody argued and nobody agreed, which would have been worse, and nobody looked at the American as though he had grown a second head, which would have been kinder and did not happen.
Valerio did the smallest thing. He reached across and filled a glass that was already nearly full — the deaf one's, at the loud end — and he said something to her about her grandson that finished a sentence somebody two seats down had left hanging, and he laughed, and the laugh was made in such a way that it had room in it for everyone including the American, and the table was his again.
He did not have to say one word to the thing Mattia had said.
He said a warm nothing to somebody else and the boards leaned back into the shape they had held before, and the wine went round, and a man picked up the boar again, where it comes up every year, and the evening closed over the place where the American had stood the way water closes over a stone.
Mattia sat back down. He had nowhere else to put himself.
He sat in the good seat that was no longer good, at the good end that had quietly stopped being the good end the moment he opened his mouth, and he reached for his wine and did not drink it, and he looked down the table once toward me and I gave him nothing back, because there was nothing in my face for him and I would not manufacture one.
Fatou, three down from me, had gone very still over her plate.
She was not looking at anyone. My mother knows exactly what a room is doing at every second she is in it, and she knew what this one was doing, and she said nothing, and later she would have plenty to say to me and none of it to him.
I finished what was on my plate. I did not hurry it. Then I stood up, the way you stand up from a table when the eating is done, and I said my goodnights down my own side and let Palla out from under the boards, and I went.
* * *
He came after me. I heard the plastic chair go over behind him and the somebody who caught it, and then his feet on the yard stones and then on the track, quick, out of breath already, and I did not slow for him and I did not stop.
He got level with me where the track leaves the last of the light from the yard and goes dark under the oaks.
He did not know where to start. He started three times.
He said he was sorry — no, he was not sorry — he said he had not meant to make it about — he said that what Valerio had done was, and there he stopped, because he did not have the word for what Valerio had done and neither do I.
He put a hand out toward my arm the way he touches people mid-sentence, without thinking, and then thought, and took it back.
Palla walked between us the whole way with her head down, working the verge for whatever the dark had put there, and she went to my leg at the gate and not to his, and he saw her do it, and even that he could not read.
I told him the lift was booked for seven.
I told him the crane could not turn if the ground was soft and that there had been no rain and the ground was hard and that was the one good thing about a dry September.
I told him the sheet over the open half wanted re-tying before the wind came round, which it would in three days, out of the north, and that a north wind in this valley at the end of September is the front edge of the weather turning, and that after it the mornings would have frost in them, and that a green joint will take a frost once and look fine and come off in your hand in the spring.
I told him what the cold does to work that went in wet.
I gave him the whole of it, plain, the way you give a man the weather, and every word of it was true and none of it was what I had walked out of that yard carrying.
He stood in the track with his hands open at his sides.
He is a man who is never without something to do with his hands and he had nothing, and he could not read one word of what I had actually said, because he has not yet learned to, and he was waiting for me to say a thing he could take hold of and pay for and put down, and there was no such thing and I was not going to invent one for him.
Tonight he stood up and gave every mouth in this comune my life to hold across their winters, without my asking, to be kind, and he will fly back in the spring and I will still be sitting at that table.
Under the thing I walked out carrying there was, for the length of one breath, another thing: no one in forty-one years has ever once stood up. It cost him a seat he did not know the price of. I put it away. It does not cure anything and it does not come back.
"I didn't ask you to do that," I said, outside, after. "And now it's done."