CHAPTER 29
THE LAST SEMPRONI
Malick
The notary came with a folder the color of old lime and set it on the table where the gourd already was, and I knew the shape of the day before he opened it. A folder like that closes a thing. You do not open it to start.
I had put a flat hand on that table an hour before, when Matias asked me to be there and I said yes without knowing why.
It is a good table. The top is one board, chestnut, cut before either of us.
It had held the deed offer two days ago and taken no mark from it. It held the folder now the same way.
Over us the volta held. I had propped it myself in the second week, a needle and two props under the worst of the crack, and the centring stood under the crown of it still, waiting for the day I would strike it.
The roof over this room was the half that had not gone.
That was why we sat here and not in the yard — one room in the house still had the sky kept off it, and it was the room with the table, and a man could sign a paper in it and not feel the weather.
The rest of the roof was a file at the Soprintendenza and the frost was coming and neither of those was on the table this morning.
This morning the table had a folder on it.
They sat across from each other, the two of them, the man who owned the house and the man whose name had been used to sell it, and between them the notary read out numbers in the flat voice men use for numbers.
I understood the numbers. I did not understand the rest, and the rest was most of it, because Hector had no Italian and Matias had no Italian, and the two of them spoke to each other in the language they both had, and it went past me like weather past a window.
That was the thing I had not braced for.
In this kitchen I am the one who knows which stone.
In this kitchen the American has to ask me what the wall is doing and then wait while I decide how much to tell him.
And here, for one morning, the room ran on a tongue I did not have, and the two of them were easy in it, quick, laughing at something, and I sat with my hands on my knees like a man in a station who has missed the announcement.
I know that station. I have watched Matias stand in it at every sagra for two months.
It is a small thing to learn from the inside and it is not small at all.
I caught a word here and there. A number.
A name. Nothing that joined up. One word in three on a good sentence and none at all on a fast one, and I built the rest from their hands and their faces the way I read a wall I cannot get behind — by what the surface is doing, slowly, mostly right, and nothing like knowing.
Matias's hands do the same thing in Italian.
I had seen them do it and thought nothing of it.
You see a thing from the far side of it and it stops being a thing you watched somebody else carry.
The notary read the house out in the register's own words — the sheet number and the parcel number, the only name the state has ever given this casale, older in that office and truer to it than Semproni ever was.
I know those numbers. I filed them myself, in May, on an istanza in the heirs' name, back when the house was going to be mine and I was only waiting on paper that would come in its own time.
The paper came. It came for the American.
The numbers did not care whose name sat above them.
That is the whole of what a register is, and it is why I have believed in it my whole life, and it is why it can do a thing like this to a man and mean nothing at all by it.
The notary turned the page. Hector signed.
He signed the way you sign for a parcel.
He did not read it twice. He did not weigh the pen.
His family had kept this house two hundred years and then, in his parents' time, left these hills for good and never come back, and he looked at the paper that gave it away the way you look at a bus timetable — to be sure of the hour, and then done with it.
He had been born after the leaving and had never once seen the place.
To Hector the hills were a place his flight went near.
I watched the ink go on and I felt the floor of it drop out.
Because a signature is a small machine and it had just run.
Before it, the house was a question with a cloud over it — the cousin who never had the right to sell, the scan of a name, the succession nobody in Buenos Aires had ever closed.
After it, no cloud. Clean. The American's, in the only sense the state can read, forever.
And somewhere under that, folded away where it would never be opened again, my money.
Paid to the heirs, on a handshake, through a cousin, into a scan of a signature.
Kept. Legal to keep. The pen that made the house clean made the loss clean too, in the same stroke, and Hector did not know I existed, and Hector was not wrong to sign, and there was nobody in the room to be angry at.
I knew how that money had gone, because I had sent it.
A little at a time, in the cousin's coat, on the cousin's trips home, an amount that would raise no question at either end.
No receipt worth the name. A handshake carried across water and back by a man who owed me, four winters of it, and at the far end a name put onto a scan and sent back, and I had believed the scan because I wanted to.
My mother told me not to. She said a scan is not a hand and a handshake across an ocean is not a handshake.
She was right and she has said so since, in front of people, and being right has never once made her gentle about it.
I have wanted a great many things I did not get. This was the first I lost while watching a decent man do the right thing.
The heirs had sold, and taken the price, and gone on with their morning.
Hector was clearing his family's paper, which is a kindness to do for people.
The American had wanted a house and had bought a house.
Every man in the chain had behaved well, and the sum of them behaving well had cost me the one wall my father ever put his hands on, and there was nowhere to stand and be angry, so the anger had nowhere to go, and it went nowhere, and I sat in a warm kitchen and passed a gourd, and it went nowhere at all.
Two days before, at this same board, Matias had pushed a paper at me and offered me the house, and there had been an easy way out of it in my mouth and I had not used it.
I could have said the paper is not clean, the man in Buenos Aires has not signed, you cannot give a thing you do not fully hold.
It was true, then. It would have been the technical answer, and technical answers are how you refuse a man without telling him why.
I did not want it. My no was not about the cloud.
So the cloud lifting today changed nothing I had decided, and there was nobody to tell that to, and I did not try.
Hector stamped his coat pocket for a pen he already had in his hand and looked at me for a second, mild, a stranger being polite, and looked away.
Matias got up in the middle of a sentence.
He did it the way you do a thing you have stopped noticing you do.
Mid-word, almost — Hector still talking — he pushed his chair and crossed to the door and stood at the frame a moment with his head tipped, reading the chalk.
He rubbed at the number with his thumb, not to change it, only the way a man touches a thing to be sure it is there.
Then he came back and sat and picked the sentence up where he had dropped it, and Hector answered him, and neither of them marked it.
The notary did not look up. The dog, Palla, asleep under the window in the one square of sun, did not move an ear.
Twenty-nine. It goes down and he writes it and it goes down.
The notary squared the pages, tapped them on the board twice — chestnut takes that sound and keeps it, a good dry knock — and closed the folder. The color of old lime. A folder like that closes a thing.
He said it was done. He said it to the room and the room did not need the word carried across to anyone.
* * *
They fed him, after, because that is what this house does now, and it is the American's doing and it is not a small thing either.
There was the torta on the stone and there was oil and there were the last tomatoes, and there was the gourd going around, and Hector took it when it came to him and drank without a word and passed it on, and that was the whole of it.
No one had told him what it was. He had walked in from an airport into a kitchen in Umbria and seen it on the table and sat down and drunk from it like a man finding his own coat on a hook.
Fatou watched him do it and said nothing and I saw her decide she liked him.
Matias watched him do it and went very still, the way he does when a thing lands somewhere he was not guarding.
He is used to explaining himself. He explains the gourd, the mate, the whole of it, to everyone, patiently, over and over, and here was a man who needed none of it explained and asked for none, and it undid him a little, and he did not say so.
He would not know how to say it in the tongue that would land it, and the tongue that would land it, Hector had, and Hector had already moved on to the oil.
The oil he did have an opinion about, and it was wrong, and he held it with the calm of a man who has held it his whole life and never once been made to test it.
He said something and Matias laughed and argued back and Hector only shrugged, unbothered, a man who did not need to win a thing because he was leaving it all behind by morning.
Fatou put more torta on his plate without asking him, which is how she agrees with a person, and he let her, which is how you accept it.
I watched them, two men easy in a room, and I was glad it was not me who had to be understood, and I was tired of being the one who understood everything in the room and could reach no one across it.
Both, at once. I have laid two mortars against each other before now and watched a wall hold because each pressed the other the opposite way.
It is not a comfortable way to stand and it stands.
Dario had come for the file and stayed for the torta, the way everyone stays for Fatou's torta, and he ate three pieces of it and then leaned to me and said the papers were clean now, all of them, no cloud left, the way you hand a man good news.
He meant it as good news. He is decent and he is buried under other men's work and he did not hear what he was saying to me — that the last knot in the American's title had been untied over lunch, in front of me, with my money folded into the price of it.
I said it was good work. It was. He looked pleased and went back to the torta.
Somebody asked Hector, through Matias, whether he wanted to walk the rest of it before he left — the rooms, the oratorio, the north wall his family had let go.
He did not. He said no kindly and without a flicker.
He had never seen the house and he was not going to begin now.
Two hundred years his people had held these stones and to him they were a line on a form he had flown in to clear, and he looked at the one thing Matias would have given a great deal to be owed by blood the way you look at a field that is not yours and never will be — with mild interest and no wish in it at all.
I have wanted this house until it wore a groove in me.
He had it handed to him down a line of dead men and wanted none of it.
There is no sense to be made of that, and I did not try.
His phone went and it was his wife, and he stepped out to the yard to take it, and through the open door I heard the shape of a long marriage in the way he said the first word — low, unhurried, a man reporting in, not a man performing.
Daughters, somewhere in it. He was on a flight tomorrow.
He had said so twice since he arrived; he said it again now, into the phone, a date already booked, a man with somewhere he belonged that was not here and had never for one hour been in doubt.
He came back in and took the gourd one more time and drank and set it down and said the surname.
He said Boccali the Buenos Aires way. The way Matias says it.
The wrong way, this village would tell you, delighted, correcting it into the mouth-shape these hills keep for it — and Hector said it exactly as wrong as Matias does, easily, with no idea it was wrong, because to him it was simply the name, the one his own family carried out of here in a different year and kept in a different city, and there was nobody to correct it to.
Matias heard his own name said back to him in his own mouth's shape by a man who did not know there was any other shape.
He did not laugh this time. He held the gourd and looked at it.
Then Hector was putting his coat on. It takes a while to leave a kitchen like this and he did it without hurry, the way he did everything, a man reading the room for nothing because he wanted nothing from it.
He shook Dario's hand. He put a hand to Fatou's shoulder and asked her something and she answered and he nodded as if he had known her a long time.
He held Matias last and longest, and that was the one with weight in it — two men sad about the same dead people, the ones who left, the ones who never came back, a whole family's worth of leaving pressed into an arm around a shoulder, and neither of them said it, and it did not need the language.
Grief has a cure time and theirs was going to be long and they both knew it and that was the goodbye.
And on the way out, at the door, under the chalk, he shook everyone's hand, including mine, and asked me what I did.