CHAPTER 28
FROST, AT THE TABLE
Matias
I had chalked the thirty-one on the door frame at first light, same as every morning, and then I had put the paper under the fruit bowl so it would not blow away, which tells you everything, because there was no wind in that kitchen and the door was shut and I had set a bowl of pears on a single sheet of paper anyway, the way you weight down a thing you are afraid of, and I had been rehearsing the sentence to go with it for eleven days, out loud, to the dog, to the stove, in the shower where nobody could hear how bad it was.
It was a good sentence. I want you to understand that I believed it was a good sentence.
I had made it short on purpose, because I had learned by then that Malick did not like a lot of words around a thing, that words around a thing were how you knew somebody did not trust the thing to stand on its own, and so I had cut it down to almost nothing, I had cut it down to the smallest generous thing I had ever built, and I sat there in the good light of the middle of the afternoon and I could not have told you it was the most Valerio thing anyone would do in the whole of that year, because a man cannot see his own hand while he is using it.
Here is the thing I had learned in October, the thing that had put the pen in my hand and the paper under the pears.
I had learned that the reason I got the house at all was a telephone.
Not a fair price, not luck, not a better eye.
A man I liked had stood on the one spot on the track where the phone works and had rung some cousins in Buenos Aires and mentioned, helpfully, that an American was asking, and that Americans pay cash, and that had been the whole of it, that had been the entire mechanism, one call and a smile and a lorry of lime crossing a field on a handshake, and there was no bill for it anywhere.
That was the part that had been eating me since the football.
You can pay a bill. You can overpay a bill, which is the thing I am actually good at, I can make a number go away, I have made numbers go away my whole life and felt clean afterward, and here at last was the one debt in the world with no number on the bottom of it, and I had done what I always do, I had invented a number, I had built the biggest number I had, and I had wrapped it in a piece of paper and put a bowl of pears on it.
He came in from the wall with the lime still on him, the burns pale on the backs of both hands and the nails cut down to nothing and grey underneath where it does not wash out, and he put a flat palm on the edge of the table before he pulled the chair, the way he touched everything first, and he said, "Mattia.
" Still Mattia. I had stood up at a table three weeks before and told forty people my name and he had heard me do it and he still said Mattia, and I had decided not to mind, I had decided it was the one place the name got to keep meaning what the village meant by it, which is a thing you tell yourself when you have already lost the argument you never had.
There was mate on the table between us. There was always mate on the table by then; Fatou had converted half the comune inside a month and Nella was still refusing on principle and would refuse for another twenty days and then not, and I pushed the gourd across without asking because that is what my hands do when they are frightened, they host, they put something warm in front of you, and he took it and drank and set it down and looked at the pears and did not ask about the paper, which was worse than asking.
"So the notaio comes Tuesday for the other thing," I said, which was the dry line, the armor, the joke I keep in front of the real thing, "and I thought, since we are all going to be standing around a table watching a man from Spoleto uncap a pen anyway, we could give him two jobs and only feed him once.
" I laughed first. I always laugh first, before anyone can do it for me.
He did not laugh. He waited, with his hand flat on the table, and I ran out of the deflection the way you run out of a step in the dark, and I lifted the bowl off the paper and I turned it around so it faced him and I said the sentence I had built.
"I want to sign the house to you."
* * *
I kept talking. Of course I kept talking.
The silence a thing like that makes is a hole and I am the man who fills holes, I told him the paper was drawn already, that it only needed the two of us and the notaio, that there was the business in Buenos Aires still to clear but that was coming, that once it was clean it could go straight from the man there to him and skip me altogether if he wanted, that I would cover the notaio, the stamp, the transcription, all of it, that he should not think about the numbers because the numbers were nothing, they were genuinely nothing to me, and I heard myself say it, they were nothing to me, and I watched it land on him, and I did not stop, I said something about how it was the only thing that made sense, how it should have been his, how everyone knew it should have been his.
And I did the thing I did not know I was doing, the thing I have watched somebody else do at the good end of a table and thought was gorgeous, I started handing out more of it.
While I was at it, I said, I could do Fatou's roof, the back corner where the tile slips, it is nothing, a day; and the boy, Ibu, if he wanted the licence, the coaching, whatever it costs, I could stand behind that too; and I heard my own voice getting warmer and more generous and more sure with every name I put into my mouth, a whole street of people I could lift, and I could not feel the shape of what I was, I could not feel it at all, I felt only that I was being kind and that being kind was the same as being safe.
He let me get to the end. He is the only person I have ever met who lets you get all the way to the end.
Then he turned the paper back around so it faced me again, not hard, he did not shove it, he just returned it to its owner, and he put one finger on it, and he said, "I want the house.
" He said it flat, the way he says a date, the way he says a thing that is true and stays true.
"I wanted it before you. I have wanted it more than I have wanted anything.
Thirty-eight thousand." He did not flinch on the number.
He said it the way you read a level, and then he took his finger off the paper.
"And I will not take it from your hand."
"It is not from my hand," I said, too fast. "It is yours, it was always—"
"If you give it," he said, "then a man gave it.
And there is a man who will tell that at every table for thirty years, kindly, and it will be believed, because it is easier than years of paper nobody wrote down.
And what he tells is not about me. It is about my mother.
It is about the boy. The American gave them the house.
That is the story, and once it is the story, my mother does not get to say what she is anymore, and Ibu does not, and the men who come after us do not.
" He stopped. His sentences stop; that is the thing about him, they end and the room has to sit in the end of them.
"You would put us all in it. To feel clean. "
"Leave my mother's roof," he said, and there was no heat in it, that is the thing, there is never any heat in it.
"I do her roof. In the spring, when I have time and no scaffold to answer for.
And the van I borrow from you, and the food you put out, and the job, and the wall under the whitewash that is worth more to me than this whole house — I take all of it, Mattia.
Look at me take it. I am the easiest man in this comune to give a thing to.
I refuse one paper. One." He drank the mate again, unhurried, and set it down, and then he said a smaller thing, a colder thing, and I watched it come out of him and I did not like the shape of it.
"And you will want to do Nella next. You have the face.
Do not. She wanted cement nine years ago.
I told her it would trap the wet, not breathe it out.
She had it put in anyway. Her back bedroom has been wet ever since.
I could dry it in a weekend. I have not.
I am not going to. She is going to sit in what she chose.
" He held my eye. "So do not go feeling generous about Nella.
I am ahead of you on Nella, and I am not kind about it. "
It landed like a small dropped stone. He meant me to see it.
He was showing me, on purpose, a mean little corner of himself, a thing an old woman would have to live inside all winter, and he was not sorry, and I understood that he was doing it so I would stop thinking of him as a man it was safe to be enormous at.
I want to tell you I did not know what he meant about the house.
I did not know what he meant for about four seconds and then I did, and the knowing came down on me worse than the bank slips, worse than the woman with the onions telling me it was not news.
Because I had been down to the tape at the site three weeks before that, on the day I found out the number, and I had stood at the plastic line I am not allowed to cross and held money out at a man carrying a hod on his shoulder, cash, in the open, in front of the crew, and I had thought the way he would not take it was pride, a man being proud, a thing you talk a proud man out of with the right warm sentence.
And it was not pride. And here it was again, at my own table, in a language I could follow this time, and it was still not pride, and the not-pride had a name and the name was me, and I still, even then, reached for the one tool I own.
"Then not a gift," I said. "A price. You tell me a fair number and I—no, listen, listen—a paper. Both our names on it. A mortgage, whatever the bank wants, I will stand next to you at the bank, we do it clean, on paper, with a number, the way you like it—"
"No bank in this province lends that much to a man named Ndiaye with no capital," he said.
"I know. I asked. Years ago. That is why there was a cousin and a handshake and a scan, and that is why the heirs could keep the money and sell to you, because there was nothing filed, because I could not make there be anything filed.
" Flat. Flat as the level. "And the paper you want to draw has a cloud on it that the man in Buenos Aires has not signed off yet.
You are trying to hand me a house you do not cleanly own to fix a thing that a bank already said no to before you existed.
" He almost smiled then, and it was not a kind almost-smile, it was tired.
"You cannot buy the one thing back. I know.
I have been trying to buy it back longer than you have owned it, and I am better at it than you. "
And then he said the part I did not have anywhere to put, he said it looking at the pears and not at me, "It costs me.
To say no to you. I want you to know it is not free.
I am not being noble. I would take it in a second if taking it did not turn me into a thing the whole village already half believes I am.
" He put his hand flat on the table again. "But it does."
He was quiet for a moment, and the light moved on the floor the way it does at that hour, and he said, lower, "My mother told me not to pay a man on a handshake.
She was right, and she has not been kind about being right, she says it in front of people, she thinks the house is a wound I keep putting a roof back on.
" He turned the mate a quarter turn on the table, not to drink it, just to have his hands do something, and I thought, absurdly, that it was the first thing I had ever seen him do with his hands that was not a repair.
"Some nights I think she is right about the house.
I do not think she is right about this." He looked up. "This one I have to get correct."
* * *
I should have stopped there. A better man stops there. He had just, very gently, refused to be the receipt.
And I did it anyway. I slid the paper back across the table at him, all the way, until it was under his hand, and I put my pen down on top of it, and I said, "Just—hold it. Just take it and hold it and we don't have to—"
"Frost," Malick said, at a kitchen table, in the middle of the afternoon, and I understood that the word had never been about the bed.