Chapter 9
ROSALIE
The plan is to be out of the building by seven.
I am at the kitchen door at six fifty with my boots in my hand, and there is a light on, and there is somebody at the stove, and it is not him.
I could go back up. I have gone back up from worse.
"Come in, come in, you are letting the cold along the floor."
I come in.
She is smaller than she was at the council table, which is a thing I have noticed about her twice now and cannot explain, and she is wearing the green cardigan and a pair of reading glasses on a chain and she is doing something violent to a bowl of flour.
"Sit," she says.
"I was going out."
"You were going out at ten to seven with your boots in your hand and no coat, so you were not going out, you were leaving." She does not look up. "There is a difference and I have watched four generations of this family do it. Sit down."
I sit down.
I do not know why I sit down. It is the third time this week that a sentence has arrived from somewhere and my body has done what it says, and as a professional I find it alarming.
"Not there."
I move.
"Not there either, that is Petar's, he will not say anything and he will sulk. There." She points with an elbow. "That one. That is a good chair. That was my chair for thirty years and now I sit at the end because I am old and I am allowed to be near the door."
I sit in the good chair.
Here is what I know about being fed.
You do not eat in front of people. That is not a preference. There are eleven ways to put something in a plate and I know all of them, and I have used four, and a person who eats what a stranger gives them in a room they do not control is a person who has not been paying attention.
Also, and I would like this understood, when you eat you look down. Your hands are busy and your eyes are on the plate and your throat is open, and it is the only three seconds of the day when absolutely anybody could do absolutely anything to you.
Nineteen years. I have never once eaten in front of another human being who was looking at me.
Ottilie Orsini sets a plate on the table under my nose.
It has eggs on it, and a thing with tomato in it, and bread, and she does not step back, because she does not know she is supposed to, and she does not know she is supposed to because nobody has told her, and I sit and look at it with my hands in my lap.
"Ah," she says.
And she turns round.
She goes back to the counter and picks the bowl up and starts on the flour again with her back to me, and she does not say one word about it, and she does not glance over her shoulder, and she does not stop talking.
"Now," she says to the wall. "The wedding was disgraceful."
She talks for eleven minutes without stopping.
She talks about the wedding, which she calls a disgrace three separate times, in three different ways, and about how her own wedding was also a disgrace and involved a man reading out of a book, and about how at least there had been a cake at hers even if it was borrowed.
Nunzia Barbera's earrings get four minutes on their own.
Then: Petar Ilic has been in love with a woman on the second floor of a building near the market since 1981 and has never once said so, and this is what is wrong with all of them, and she has told him so to his face, twice, and he pretended not to hear it with the good ear.
The flour is wrong. The shop is worse.
And by the time she has finished the plate is empty and I do not entirely remember doing it.
She sits down opposite me with her own cup and takes the glasses off her nose and lets them drop on the chain, and looks at me properly for the first time.
"Now," she says. "You will want to know why I did it."
"Yes."
"Good. That is a good answer. The girls in this family say no and then they sit there wanting to know for six weeks.
" She turns the cup round. "I did it because I am seventy nine and I have buried a husband and a son and I have one grandson left who does not sleep, and on Tuesday I watched him look at somebody the way he has not looked at anything since he was eleven years old, and Yves Bregman was going to have you shot in my house. "
"That is not a reason."
"No," she agrees. "It is four reasons. I only need one of them to be good."
I do not have anything to say to that.
"Also," she says, "I do not like being told there is nothing to be done. There is always something to be done. There is a margin in that book that nobody has read since 1961 and I have read it eleven times because I am in it, and I have been waiting fifty nine years for somebody to make me use it."
"You are in it."
"Nicolo wrote it for me." She says it exactly the way she said the flour was wrong.
"I was twenty, I was Belgian, I was not family, and there were seven men at a table who wanted me gone, and he went home and put four lines in the margin of the book in his own hand and came back the next morning and read them out with a straight face.
" She drinks her tea. "It was the only interesting thing he ever did.
I married him for it. Do not tell anybody that. "
"Who would I tell?"
"That is the spirit."
She puts a second plate in front of me without asking and turns round again before it has landed, and I am halfway through it before I notice she has done it twice.
"Stop that," I say.
"Stop what."
"Turning round."
"I am doing the pastry." She does not turn round. "It has to be cold. If I stand here looking at you it goes warm in my hands and then it is a biscuit and I have not made a biscuit in this house since 1974."
"You are lying."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because you have not eaten in front of a person in a long time," Ottilie says to the flour, "and I do not need to know how long, and I do not need to know why, and I have raised two boys and buried one of them and I know what it looks like when somebody is waiting to be told they are being ridiculous.
" She thumps the dough over. "So I will do the pastry.
And in about a month you will eat something in front of me and neither of us will mention it and I will win. "
I sit at a table in a warm room with my fork in my hand.
"That is a trick," I say.
"Everything I do is a trick, dear. I am seventy nine. It is all I have left."
At some point I say, "Nonna," because it is what everyone in this house says, and she puts the cup down hard enough to ring.
"No."
"What?"
"I am Belgian." She says it with fifty nine years behind it.
"I am from Ghent. My mother was from Ghent, my grandmother was from Ghent, and I have been in this country since I was twenty and every single one of them calls me Nonna, which is not a word, which is not my word, which is a word for somebody's Italian grandmother in a film. "
"What should I call you?"
"Ottilie."
"All right."
"Nobody does it."
"I will do it."
She looks at me over the cup for a second.
"You will not," she says, comfortably. "Give it three weeks. It gets in through the walls." She waves a hand. "Anyway. Nonna."
I ask her one thing before I go.
I do not plan it. It is becoming a pattern and I would like it to stop.
"There is a coat," I say. "On the chair at the end."
Ottilie's hands stop on the cup.
It is not much. It is about as much as Cesare's face did when I sat in it, which is to say almost nothing, and then she picks the cup up again and finishes her tea.
"Yes," she says.
"Whose is it?"
"Ines's."
"Who is Ines?"
"Ah," Ottilie says. "No. That is not mine to give you and he will do it badly, and it will still be better coming from him.
" She stands up and takes both cups to the sink.
"Ask him. Not today. He is at the port until seven and he will come back grey and he will not eat, and if you ask him tonight he will tell you the short version, which is the wrong one. "
"When, then."
"When he brings it up himself," she says, "which he will, because he has been waiting twenty three years to have somebody in this house who does not already know."
At the door she catches my wrist.
Not hard. She is seventy nine and her hands are like paper over wire, and she takes my wrist the way you would take a door handle, entirely without asking, because it has not occurred to her that there is anything to ask.
Everything in me goes very still.
"Sunday," she says.
"What?"
"You will come Sunday. Half past twelve. The house on Vroom Street, the blue door, everybody comes."
"I do not think that is a good idea."
"It is a terrible idea," she agrees. "There will be eleven cousins and Dario will ask you what you do. Half past twelve."
"I have not said yes."
"You will come Sunday," Ottilie says, and lets go of my wrist, and pats it twice as she does it, which is somehow worse.
And I hear myself say, "All right," from a long way off, and she says, "Good girl," and shuts the door.
I stand in the hall for a while.
There is a coat on a chair. There is a woman in a green cardigan who has just fed me, twice, without looking at me, and who did it so smoothly that I did not notice the manoeuvre until I was on the wrong side of it, which is a thing I have not been on the wrong side of since I was seventeen.
I go up six floors and out onto the roof and the hatch squeaks the whole way, because I have not fixed it, because I said I would not.
The chair Teodoro dragged up in July is exactly where he said. It is a genuinely terrible chair.
I sit in it.
Below me the river goes out under the bridges, and behind me the hatch is still standing open, and somewhere three floors down a man who is not asleep knows exactly where I am.
Thirty five days.
And I have agreed to have lunch.