CHAPTER 30
IN HIS OWN WORDS
Matias
Hector's car took the turn past Valerio's gate and was gone, and I stood in the doorway of the room I rented with the chalk in my hand and wrote the number under all the other numbers, twenty-seven, small, on the frame, because I am a man who is not allowed to lift a hammer in this country and the chalk is the only thing they let me do with my hands, and I had done it every morning since August, out loud, cheerful, in front of whoever was there, and I had never once let myself hear what I was counting down to.
I put the chalk on the sill. I heard him come up behind me, not fast — he never moves fast, it is one of the things about him, he arrives at a thing the way you arrive at the top of a hill, in your own time and already there — and he reached past me and closed the door, and his forearm went by my face, and there is a burn on the inside of it, old, pale, a stripe where the lime got him years ago and stayed, and I have looked at that stripe more times than I will ever tell him.
The house was Hector's signature and then it was gone.
Two days ago it had a cloud on it and now the cloud was off it and it was mine, cleanly, forever, the notary's stamp still wet in the folder in the other room, and none of that was in this room, and that was the point, though I did not have the point yet.
I only had that his arm was warm and the day was over and there was nothing left to sign.
I am a man who understands most things through a price.
It is the water I swim in; my grandfather in Buenos Aires priced everything and my father priced everything and I have run three restaurants and I know to the cent what a bottle of wine is worth to a table at nine o'clock on a Friday, and the trouble is that I have spent my whole life assuming that a thing you can pay for is a thing you can therefore have, and this house had cost me one wire transfer and one signature from a man who flew in from another hemisphere to give it, and I had watched the whole machine of it turn over that afternoon in the notary's back office, the stamp, the pen, the coat going onto the man's shoulders, and I had thought, standing there, that I had never in my life bought something that changed so little by being bought.
The chalk had said twenty-eight that morning.
Now it said twenty-seven. That was the only thing that had moved.
"Come here," he said. He says everything in the smallest words he has.
His English is a room with three chairs in it.
I have stopped hearing it as less. It is the opposite of Valerio, who can furnish a whole afternoon out of nothing and leave you owing him for the chairs.
Malick says come here and it is the entire sentence and there is no floor under it and no price on it, and I went.
He put his mouth on my mouth first, which he always does, slow, deciding it while he did it, and I felt the callus ridge of his thumb come up along my jaw, the flat left one, flatter than the right from one handle he has held since he was nineteen, and I let him turn my head where he wanted it.
That is the thing nobody would believe about him if I told them, and I will not tell them: that the ease is mine.
I am the one who lives in his body like a house he already owns.
Malick comes to his own the way he comes to everything, on purpose, deciding it first. He decides to want.
You can watch him do it. It is the least casual thing I have ever seen and it undoes me every time, that a man has to make up his mind to take his shirt off and does, out loud, so I will hear him do it —
"I want this," he said, against my mouth, and it was not smooth and it was not a line, it was a man clearing a thing off a table so he could put his hands flat on the wood. "Okay?"
"Yes," I said. "God, yes."
We got to the bed with our clothes half off and the light going amber through the one window, and there was nothing else in the room, no folder, no gourd, no chalk, no invoice, nothing on either of us to prove or to pay.
His hands were the only hard thing in the whole soft evening.
I got him down and got my mouth on the burn on his forearm and he made a sound low in his chest that was almost nothing, and that was the first of it.
I went up the arm to the shoulder that will not go past a certain place after a day overhead, and he stopped me there with a hand, gentle, because it does not go there, and I kissed it where it does go, and he let out the breath he had been keeping.
His eyes stayed open on me the whole time, dark and steady and not soft, watching me want him, which is a thing he does that I have never learned to bear — he does not close his eyes for it, he keeps them open like a man counting his own courage, and I am the one who looks away.
"Turn," he said, and I turned, and I heard him behind me get the slick, unhurried, his knees settling — those knees, thirty years of kneeling to a wall, they crack when he lowers himself and he never notices and I notice every time — and then his hand, the fingers cut to nothing, the nails gone, lime in the beds of them that does not come out no matter what he does, and I felt one of them press slow, and I pushed back into it and heard myself say something that was not a word.
"Slow," he said, to me, to himself. He opened me up slow and stayed slow, without hurry and without doubt, and when he came into me it did not stop being slow and I had to put my face in the pillow and breathe or make a noise the whole village would file a report about.
And then he started to talk.
I want to be careful about how I say this, because if I say it wrong it becomes a scene it was not.
It was not a confession. I already knew.
I had known since a Tuesday in September when Fatou stood in the yard and said one flat sentence with her hands full of beans and did not soften it, and I had known before that, really, from the bank slip that came to me in an envelope in September that I did not ask for, the amount on it in a currency I could read even if I could read nothing else, somebody's instalments carried across in another man's name, and from the dates on the plastic gauges on the wall of my own house that I had walked past for two months, the earliest one a year I could read because a number is not a language, twenty twenty-two, penciled by a hand I now knew, on a wall I now owned. I knew. So this was not new.
It was that he was the one saying it. For ten weeks it had been a thing said about him, in other people's mouths, and now, with his weight on me and his breath coming rough, he was taking it out of all those mouths and putting it back in his own, and I understood that this was not information changing hands.
This was a man repossessing his own life in the one place he had ever been allowed to keep it, and letting me hear him do it, and I had done nothing to earn that and could not buy it and would not have known where to send the money.
"I buy this house," he said, moving in me, his voice going where his breath let it, no order to it, present tense, the tense of a man who owns no other.
"Four year I buy it. No bank, no mortgage — is a hand shake.
Every month I give my cousin, he take it to the bank in the city, for the family in the other country.
" A push, and I lost the thread and found it.
"No paper. I have — a picture. Of a name.
On a phone. That is all I have. Thirty-eight thousand. Is gone."
He said the number and did not stop moving and I did not stop him and neither of us treated it like glass.
And here is the thing I have never said to anyone and did not say then either, that I only thought, with his hand flat and unhurried on my hip and the burn of him and the good of it going through me in waves: when Fatou told me in the yard, the first thing I felt was not shame.
I have gone back and rearranged it a hundred times so it would be shame, because shame is the correct thing, shame is the thing a decent man feels, and it will not stay rearranged.
It was relief. My whole chest went loose with it.
Because the house was the reason he could not leave — his father's wall was in it, sixty metres of joint that is still standing, and his mother is up the road, and his nephew, and the deadline, and the whole rooted obligated weight of a man who cannot go anywhere — and I had bought the house, and so I got to keep him, and the thing that let me keep him was the thing I had done to him, and I was glad.
I lay there being taken apart by a man I had helped to trap and I was glad he was trapped, and I knew it, and I did it anyway, and that is not a thing you get to put down later by feeling bad about it in a bed.
"You are quiet," he said.
"I'm listening," I said, which was true and was also the smallest possible piece of the truth, and he laughed once, a real one, surprised out of him, and the laugh did something in me that the rest of it had not, and I reached back and got a fistful of the sheet and held on.
He finished with his forehead down between my shoulder blades and his hand splayed on my chest, all ten cut fingers of it, and he stayed there a while breathing, and neither of us said the thing you say.
He never says my name in a bed. He says it wrong the rest of the time, the way the whole village says it wrong, Mattia, warm, and I have never corrected a single one of them and I did not know until that year that I would rather be called the wrong name by these people than the right one by anyone else, and in here he does not say even that.
In here he says okay and slow and come here and once, tonight, a number.
We lay in the amber going grey. His breathing came down.
There was a lorry somewhere far off on the provincial road and then there was not.
My back was against his chest and his arm was over me, the burned one, and I put two fingers on the old pale stripe of it in the dark, not to do anything, just to know it was there.
"You never told me that before," I said. I meant the four years. I meant it kindly.
"I never tell it," he said. "Not to nobody.
" A pause. I felt him weigh the next words and then let them come, in his own time, the way a man sets down something heavy where it can be seen.
"Everywhere I go, I am — showing. The paper.
The register. The invoice. All day I am proving.
To the office. To the commission. To the men who buy the lime.
" His hand moved once on my stomach and was still.
"Here nobody ask me for proof." He was quiet. "So here I can say it."
I did not answer that, because there was no answer to it that was not either a lie or the truth. Keeping my mouth shut was the first decent thing I had done in the room.
He was asleep before me. He sleeps like a man who has earned it, which he has, every night of his life.
I lay and listened to him and thought about the gauges on the wall of the house that was now mine, the little plastic tabs glued across the cracks with a date penciled next to each one in his hand, and how for two months I had walked past them a dozen times a day and never once stopped to read them, because I did not know yet that a date is a thing you can read in a language you cannot speak, and because some part of me, the part that priced everything, had not wanted to.
He had been measuring that house not moving for four years.
I had turned up in August with a wire transfer and started chalking the days until I lost it, and I had thought the two of us were doing different arithmetic, and we were not.
I lay with the chalk number bright in my head, twenty-seven days, San Martino, the day the whole valley moves out of something, and I thought about the deed in the folder in the other room with my name on it and his father's wall inside it and nobody's name on the wall, and I did not feel generous and I did not feel forgiven, and for once I did not reach for anything to fix it with, because there was nothing in this room to buy and no one in it to host, and the relief was still there in my chest, warm and low and mine, and it would not turn into anything better no matter how long I lay there in the grey and waited for it to.
He said the number out loud, in a bed, to the man who had paid it in an afternoon, and nobody in the room was surprised, and that was not the point.