CHAPTER 25
SOMEONE ELSE'S SIGNATURE
Malick
The facing came off a hand's width at a time, and under it the plaster held where three men with letters after their names had written that it would not.
I took it slow. You do not peel a face. You coax the gauze and the paste up together with the flat of a warm spatula, and where it does not want to lift you leave it, and you come back the next day, and the day after that it lets go on its own because it has decided you are patient.
The whitewash is the danger. Somebody limed over this wall a hundred years ago to be rid of the saints on it, and the lime bit down into the colour, and now the colour and the lime are one skin.
Clean it and you take the image off with the dirt.
So you do not clean it. You seal the edge.
You feed the ground from behind through a hole the size of a pinhead and you let the grout crawl in and grip and hold the whole giornata onto the wall it was painted on in a week more than three hundred years ago by a man whose name is also gone.
I worked from the top of the door arch down.
Under the props. The crown of the vault ran cracked over my head the whole time, held on its wedges, kissed by the centring and not lifted by it, and the sheet over the gone half of the roof breathed in and out with the afternoon like something asleep.
The surviving half kept the light off me.
That is why I could work at all. A fresco in the sun is a fresco you lose.
The paste bites. It is lime, and lime does not care whose side it is on.
There is a crack across the back of my right hand that has been open for years and closes in the summer and comes apart again the first cold week, and the paste finds it, and it burns the way it has burned my father and his maestro and every man who ever put a hand in a pit and did not wear the glove because you cannot feel the wall through the glove.
The nails go first. Cut to nothing and stained under with a grey that does not wash out and never has.
You do not restore lime work with clean hands.
There is no such thing and there never was, and the men who wrote the article know it, and their hands look like mine.
A hand's width, and then a hand's width.
By the end of the day I had cleared a stretch you could cover with a coat.
A blue. Not much of a blue. The hem of something.
Whoever was wearing it is still under the lime and will be there when I am done or will not come up at all, and either way I will have done the same work, because the work does not change for what it finds.
The restauratore came on Tuesdays.
She stood where I put the trestle for her and she looked and she said, mostly, yes.
Yes to the veiling. Yes to the grade of the grout.
Once she said take another two millimetres off the salt bloom in the corner and she was right, I had left it because I did not trust my own hand near the blue, and she saw that too and did not say it.
She is good. I do not want it thought that she is not good.
She has the degree I do not have and the debt that came with the degree and she drives two hours to stand in a cold oratorio and tell a man who has been doing this since he was fourteen that his veiling is correct. Then she signs.
The regolare esecuzione is a single sheet.
It certifies that the intervention on the surface was carried out to standard, under direction, on this date, at this address.
It has a photograph clipped to it. I took the photograph.
I set the scale bar against the cleared blue and I held the camera level and I wrote the date on the border in pencil the way I write the date on everything, and it went into the folder, and the folder went to her, and at the bottom of the sheet, under all of it, is her name.
I looked at it longer than I look at most paper. Not for long. Long enough to read it, which is not a thing I say out loud in this chapter of my life and did not say now.
Her name, on my wall.
The folder does not mind. The folder never minds.
I keep it the way another man keeps a photograph of a dead parent — flat, dry, out of the sun, handled at the corners.
Certificates. Site photographs with scale bars in them, dated, countersigned.
Every giornata I have ever brought back up is in there with somebody's stamp on it, because a stamp is the only kind of memory this country keeps, and I have spent my whole working life feeding it.
It has believed me every time. Ask the register what I have done and it will tell you, chapter and verse, with dates.
There is no sheet in the folder for the north wall.
There is no photograph with a scale bar in it of my father's hands.
He pointed the joint that has stood through everything a hill can do to a wall, and nobody ever wrote his name down, and the wall does not carry a signature, walls never do.
I closed the folder and put a plank across the pit of it in my chest and went back to the blue.
The smell was the poultice by then, the whole oratorio thick with it — the wet paper, the sacking, the ammonia coming off the salts as they drew — and I banked it warm against the plaster and left it to pull the wall's old bitterness out into the paper overnight.
In the morning I would peel the sacking and the salt would be on it in a white ghost and the wall would be a little cleaner of the century that had been sitting in it.
That is the work. It is not interesting.
I have never wanted to do anything else.
* * *
Palla came in around four, which she is not supposed to do, the site being a site, and went to my leg, and stood against it while I fed grout behind a three-hundred-year-old hem, and then lay down on the coldest flagstone she could find and slept.
Nobody sent her out. She has been on more restorations than most of the men on the register.
Matias came as far as the line and no further, because that is where the line is, and he had two coffees, and he handed one across the tape to Dario who was nearer, and he did not hand one to me because he has learned, finally, in October, that I do not stop for coffee when the paste is open.
He watched instead. He is good at watching now.
In August he watched a man water a wall and could not make it mean anything; today he stood at the tape and watched me feed a hole the size of a pin and did not ask what I was doing.
"Is it a saint," he said. Not really a question. His sentences do that, they go up at the end and then do not wait.
"A hem," I said.
"Of a saint."
"Of somebody." I did not turn around. The paste does not wait for the conversation.
"Could be a saint. Could be the woman who paid for the saint, put in at the front so everybody knew who paid.
" That happened, in these hills, more than the church likes.
The donor at the Madonna's elbow, larger than the shepherds, because the shepherds did not commission anything.
He laughed. He liked that. He likes it when the old thing turns out to have money in it, because then it is a thing he understands.
He went away happy and I went on with the hem, and I did not tell him that his coffee had gone cold on the tape because I had not touched it, and that Dario had drunk it, and that no money had come to me for any of this, and had not for weeks, and that I had been the one to stop it.
He does not know that arithmetic. Nobody has done that arithmetic out loud and nobody is going to.
The wall is not being paid for. That is why I can do it.
The cheapest thing I ever had to give this house was the money, so I gave it back, and kept the wall.
The light went off the sheet at half five.
I sealed what I had opened, closed the day, and on the way out I read the chalk on the door frame the way I read the gauges, without deciding to.
Thirty-seven, in his hand. He is the only one who touches it.
The number only goes down. I did not do anything about the number.
There is nothing to do about a number. I banked the poultices, damped the sacking, and left the blue to think about whether it would let go of any more of itself in the night.
* * *
The journal came Thursday.
It came the way everything comes to Dario, which is to say two ways at once and one of them broken.
The PEC sits in a box nobody has opened since the spring, filling, silent, official, a legal address that legally received a thing that no living person has read.
And the fax — the fax, which should have died before Matias was born — spat the same thing out on curling paper across the floor of the geometra's office overnight, and worked, and was warm when Dario picked it up, and he brought it up the track because he is decent and thought I would want to see it.
"They're talking about the oratorio," he said, and handed it over, and stood there deciding whether to say the rest.
I put a flat hand on the page before I read it. Old habit. Then I read it.
It was a proper piece, in a proper journal, by people with proper names.
Restorers. The kind with the degree and the debt and thirty years on public scaffolds, who have earned every stamp they own the long way, through the front.
They had heard about the wall. They did not name me — they did not need me, I was not the point — but they named the route.
The side door. The transitional article that lets a man onto the register on years of documented direct technical direction instead of on a diploma.
And they put three words to that door, in print, one after another, each one shutting it a little harder than the last. Incomprensibile.
Immotivata. Illegittima. A man does not need the dictionary for those. You hear where they fall.
They were not talking about my hands. My hands they would probably like. They were talking about the door my hands came through, and they wanted it shut, and they had reasons, and the reasons were good.
That is the part I sat with. Not the anger, because there was no anger in it, no slur, no name, nothing you could hold up and say look, they hate me.
There was a craft argument, clean, correct in its own frame, made by men who love the work the way I love the work and have paid for the loving of it in money I did not have and did not spend, and their argument was that a man like me should not be allowed to certify a wall like this on a wall like this — that the thing they were fighting for, the standard, the proof, the paper, was the exact thing that ought to keep me off the scaffold I was standing on.
They had a point. I know a bad joint from a good one and I know a bad argument from a good one, and this was a good one. It said the register is only worth what it is hard to enter. And I have made my whole life out of the register being worth something.
That is the thing that will not sit flat, so I did not try to make it sit flat.
I stood in a cold office with a warm page in my hand and I agreed with the men who would have kept me out.
A wall you can walk into is not a wall. A door that opens for anyone is not a door, it is a gap, and a gap is a fault, and you fill a fault, you do not leave it for the next man to fall through.
They are right about the door. I have said harder things than that to Ibu about a chisel he was allowed to hold before he had earned it.
I came through the door. Both of those are true, and neither one moves the other.
There was more, at the end, about whether the fresco was even a lawful find — whether coming up under a whitewash in a private house makes it the kind of chance discovery the law has a word for, or something else, something that should have gone through a different door before a spatula ever touched it.
They put it carefully. They did not say it was so.
They said it was arguable, and that it had not been argued, and that it should be.
And there they were right too. I do not know the answer.
I have not let myself pretend I know it, and the restauratore who signs does not know it either, and we have both been careful not to say the word for it as though it were settled.
Dario watched me read.
"The machine got it," he said, meaning the PEC, meaning the box nobody opens. "Legally. Weeks ago." He almost smiled. "Nobody read it. So legally you've known for weeks and actually you've known for a minute."
"The fax read it," I said.
"The fax always reads it." He folded his arms. It is the one machine in the province that never fails and it is thirty years obsolete and it is how anything true ever reaches anyone here. "You want me to answer it."
"No."
"You want to answer it."
I thought about it the way you think about whether to open a joint that is holding. You can. You can always open it. And then you have opened it, and it is not holding any more, and you did that.
"No," I said.
I gave him back the paper. He took it down the track to put in a folder of his own, the paper folder, the one the fax feeds, because the electronic one is full and unread and immortal and no use to anybody.
Palla went with him as far as the yard and then came back, because the poultices smell of something she has decided is food.
I read it twice and went back to the wall, because the wall did not care who was right.