CHAPTER 31
A FOLDING TABLE
Malick
The frost was three days out. You cannot read the thing itself; you read what it sends ahead.
The morning came up hard and clean and the smell in the yard had gone thin, the fat cooked out of it, and the swallows that had lined the wire over the oratorio all summer were not on the wire.
That is how you know. Not the cold. The wire.
I put a flat hand on the north face on my way past and it was colder than it had been, and that told me nothing new, the north face is always cold, but the hand is how I read and I do not skip it for anyone.
Then I went to the pit up on the common and lifted the plank and looked at the water standing on the putty.
A hand's depth. The water is not the store.
The water is the lid. Under it the lime was fine, sitting there being lime, patient the way I am not, and I put the plank back and I did not think about who the man from the Regione would decide the ground under it belonged to.
Not yet. I had not been told yet. I had only been told there was going to be a man.
The paper had come by fax, which is the only thing in this valley that arrives.
There is a certified box the comune sends everything to, a box with my name spelled right and nobody's eyes on it, and beside it there is a fax machine at the tabaccheria that is thirty years old and screams, and everyone in Montecalce reads the fax.
Dario had rung me the night before, tired, decent, sideways about it the way he is about everything now.
"It's the Regione," he said. "For the qualitas soli. On the common."
"When."
"They appoint a perito. A demaniale. It's law, Malick, it has to be someone from outside — not the comune, not a resident, nobody with land here. Neutral." He said the word carefully, the way you say a word you have decided to believe. "So it's clean. Nobody local can touch it."
"Good," I said, and I meant nothing by it, and then I heard it, and I did not say the second thing.
A man who has never been to this village is going to stand on the common and decide what the common is.
By law it has to be him. By law it cannot be anyone who knows it.
I have lived here forty-one years and there is no version of this where my knowing the ground is worth anything, because the knowing is exactly the thing that disqualifies you.
Dario thinks that is fairness. And it is.
It is going to be a stranger's afternoon, and nobody in this village could have been the one to do it, and nobody is going to say that out loud, not Dario, not me.
I did not say it. I said, "He brings his own table? "
Dario laughed, because he thought it was a joke. "A folding one, probably. They come, they set it up, they measure, they're gone by evening."
Gone by evening. Forty-one years, and a folding table, and gone by evening.
I hung up and I did the other call, the one I do not tell my mother I make, because it never gives me anything and she can hear the nothing in my voice for two days after.
The upgrade. The register. There is a route that does not need the degree, that takes years of documented direct technical direction and counts them, and I have the years — 2016, the scaffolds in the Valnerina, my hands on the giornate while a man with three letters after his name signed the sheet and went to lunch.
I have the years. What I do not have is the paper that says what proof of the years is enough, because the decree that says what proof is enough has not been written.
It is not late. It is not lost in a box.
It does not exist. There is a window that closes and no rule for how to get through it, and there is an office in Rome, and I called the office in Rome.
A woman answered who was not unkind. I asked her what documents the commission would accept for the transitional route.
She said the criteria were being defined.
I asked when. She said she could not anticipate the decree.
I asked what I should send in the meantime, so that when the decree came I would not be starting cold.
She said, gently, that she would not want me to prepare the wrong thing.
The wrong thing. I have a folder. I have built a folder for two years for a test nobody has published, and every month I put another sheet in it, and I do not know if a single sheet in it counts, and the woman in Rome does not know either, and there is nobody above the woman in Rome who knows, because the thing that would tell us has not been decided by a man who has not been appointed.
I know how to prove a wall. You do not argue a wall.
You cut a hole in the render and you show the man the joint behind it, and the joint is either bedded right or it is not, and the joint does not care whose son you are or how the office is having its day.
I have spent my whole life on the side of things that can be shown.
A crack widens or it does not; you glue the plate across it and you write the date and next year the number is the same or it is worse, and the number does not lie and cannot be charmed.
And I built a whole man out of that. A man who believed that if you did the thing right and wrote it down, the writing held.
The register held. Paper was the one thing in this country that ever took what I brought it and did not send me back to the end of the line, and I have trusted it ever since the way you trust a wall you pointed yourself, flatly, without needing to say so.
And now it wants a proof it has not decided the shape of.
I am standing in front of it with my hands full of the right thing and no way to know if it is the right thing, and that — not the frost, not the man, not my mother being right — is the cold I could not put a plank over.
My father is in no folder. He mixed the lime on the reconstruction at Assisi in 1997, hot-mixed it, ran the gauge on it, taught the mix to men who never learned his name, and there is no sheet anywhere in this country with his hand on it.
He proved himself every single day and the proof went nowhere because nobody was collecting it.
I am collecting mine. That is the only difference and I do not know yet if it is a difference.
You put the sheet in the folder because the alternative is to be him, and being him is unbearable.
I did not think about that for long. I do not, on purpose. A man who thinks about that stops working, and I do not stop working.
* * *
My mother came up the track at eleven with a bag and the dog. Palla found my leg first, the way she always does, leaned the whole warm weight of herself into my shin and stood there, and I let her, and my mother watched me let her and said nothing about it because there is nothing to say about it.
"You look like a fax machine," Fatou said. "Grey. Screaming inside."
"I'm working."
"You're standing." She put the bag on the low wall and started taking things out of it, the way she does, so that whatever she is going to say she can say it to her own hands.
Bread. A jar. The gourd — she has her own now, she took to it in a day and is unbearable about how fast. "Dario told me about the man from the Regione. "
"Dario tells you everything."
"Dario tells me because you don't." She poured the water off the thermos into the gourd and drank and did not offer it to me, because she knows I do not, and passed nothing and made her point with the not-passing.
"So. A stranger comes and looks at the common and decides.
And your pit is on the common. And your yard is on the common. "
"By residence," I said. "The book says residenti. I have forty-one years of residence."
"The book." She said it flat. "You believe in the book."
"I believe in what's written down."
"You believe in what's written down," she said, and she let it sit, and she is the only person alive who can make my own faith sound like the stupidest thing about me, because she watched the thing I paid on that was not written down, and she told me not to, and she was right, and being right has not made her one degree kinder.
"You gave that cousin in Buenos Aires money for years on a scan of a signature.
A scan. I told you. I sat in my own kitchen and told you, get the paper, get the man to a notaio, get it stamped, and you told me — what did you tell me. "
"I told you it was between us."
"Between us." She drank. "There is no between us.
There is the paper and there is the man who kept your money, and the man who kept your money is warm about it in an accent you trust, and now there is a folding table coming to tell you whether the ground your father's lime is sitting on is even yours to stand on.
" She wiped the bombilla on her sleeve. "Walk away from the house, Malick. "
She has been saying it since August and it is not a small thing she says, it is the good argument, the one I have no answer to.
The house is a wound with a roof half on it.
She is not wrong. She was not wrong about the handshake and she is not wrong about this, and I stood there in the thin cold morning being told the true thing by the one person who has never once softened it for me, and I did what I do. I put a flat hand on the wall.
"The wall stands," I said. "My father pointed it. It stands."
"The wall stands," she said, "and the man who owns it now is American, and you are still up here reading his cracks for free.
" She was not being cruel. She was being exact, which from her is worse.
"You will read that man's house until it kills you the way it killed your father, and there will be no folder for that either. "
"He's not paying me," I said. "I took myself off it."
"I know you did." She looked at me then, over the gourd, and for one second there was something under the flint that was not argument, and she put it away before I could take it, because she manages me exactly as much as I manage her and neither of us will be the first to stop.
"That was the stupidest of all of it. At least when he paid you it made sense to a stranger. Now you're just a man on a hill."
"I'm the man who knows the lime."
"You're the last man who knows the lime," she said.
"That's not a job. That's a sentence." And she picked up her bag and left half the bread and took the dog, and Palla went with her sixty metres and then thought about it and came back and lay down against the north face in the one strip of sun, and I let her stay, and I did not go inside, and the cold came up out of the ground through my boots the way it comes up before it comes down, and I stood there a while, and I did not count the days.
There is a number chalked on the door frame.
It said twenty-five. I did not put it there and I do not read it out loud. He reads it. I read the sky.
* * *
The sky in the afternoon did the thing it does before it turns.
It went a high thin white, no weight in it, the blue behind it pulled far back, and the light on the far ridge came sideways and gold and mean, and that light is a liar, it looks like warmth and it is the sun getting out of the way.
Three days. Maybe four. Then a first freeze, not a killing one, a testing one, and the lime in the pit does not care about a testing one because the water is on it, but the mortar on a wall does, green mortar in a joint does, and there is no green mortar in a joint right now because the site is what it is and the roof file is where it is, and that is its own cold.
I went up to the signal spot on the track, the one everybody uses and nobody names, where you stand in view of the road and it is a public act to make a private call, and I called the number Dario gave me for the Regione, for the appointment, for the man with the table.
It rang out.
I called the comune. The clerk who is not the clerk who knows things answered, and I asked when the perito was expected, and she said she did not have that, the appointment was made at the Regione and the date of the sopralluogo would be communicated.
I asked communicated when. She said when it was set.
I asked who sets it. She said the perito, in agreement with the office.
I asked which office. There was a pause of the kind that is not rudeness, it is a person looking at a screen that does not have the answer either, and she said she would note that I had asked.
She would note that I had asked. There is a folder somewhere now with a line in it that says a man from Montecalce wanted to know when the man from outside was coming to say what Montecalce is.
That line will help nobody. It is proof of a question, filed against a decree that does not exist, waiting on a table that has not been unfolded, and I stood on the track in the mean gold light with the phone warm and useless against my face, and below me the north wall held the last of the sun, sixty metres of my father's joint holding up a house that is not mine, on ground a stranger will measure, in a season that is turning, and I asked the only question I had a right to ask, which was the small one, the schedulable one.
I asked when the man was coming. Nobody knew. There was nobody to ask.