Chapter 10
CESARE
The house on Vroom Street has a blue door, one bathroom, and on a Sunday it contains somewhere between nineteen and thirty one people depending on who is speaking to whom that month, and there is no version of the afternoon in which anybody gets to sit near an exit.
I explain this in the car.
"Nineteen to thirty one," she says.
"Approximately."
"That is not a range. That is two different events."
"It depends on Dario's mother, who is not speaking to Nunzia, who is my second cousin, and whether Marco has brought the new one, which he will, because he always does, and then everybody has to pretend they have not met the last one.
" I take the turn onto Vroom Street. "There is one bathroom.
There is one door in and one door out and they are the same door.
And everybody will want to look at you."
"Why?"
"Because I got married in eleven minutes without telling anyone and they have had five days."
She is quiet for a moment.
"How many exits," she says.
"One."
"Say it again."
"One, Rosalie."
"All right," she says, in the voice of a woman being told the water is cold, and gets out of the car.
I lose her within four minutes.
That is not carelessness. There is a hallway that becomes a kitchen that becomes a back room, and there are three separate conversations happening in it at shouting volume about a christening, and my aunt Rosa has me by the arm and is telling me about her hip, and by the time I get free my wife has been absorbed.
I find her in the back room with a glass of wine she is not drinking, standing with her shoulders against the only piece of wall in the house that faces the door, and six people arranged in a rough half circle in front of her.
She looks like a woman at a firing squad who has decided to be polite about it.
Dario is doing the talking. Dario is always doing the talking.
"So what do you do," he says.
Every conversation in the room does not stop, because that only happens in films, but three of them get about twenty per cent quieter.
I am nine feet away with an aunt on my arm.
There is no version of this that I can reach.
"I kill people for money," Rosalie says.
There is a pause of about one second.
And then the entire room detonates.
Dario laughs so hard he has to put a hand on the sideboard.
My aunt Rosa says, "Oh, she is dreadful," with enormous approval.
Somebody at the back says, "Finally," and somebody else says, "Cesare, where did you find her," and Marco's new one, who is twenty three and has been terrified for an hour, laughs like a drain and then looks around to check that she is allowed to.
Rosalie stands against the wall holding her wine and watches it happen to her.
I have never seen anybody look so completely at a loss.
"What did I say," she says, when I get to her.
"Nothing. You are fine."
"They are laughing."
"They are."
"I told the truth."
"I know," I say. "That is why it worked."
They do not let her go for two hours.
That is the thing I did not expect. I had prepared for a difficult afternoon in which my family were coldly polite to a stranger and Bregman's cousin took notes, and instead what happens is that she is a hit, because she answers everything asked of her exactly, literally, at length, with no idea which parts are supposed to be edited out.
Dario asks how we met.
"He had me held down on a stairwell for six hours."
Rosa asks if it was romantic.
"No."
Marco asks what she thought of me.
"I thought he was slow."
The room goes up again. Teodoro, who has arrived late and is eating standing up as usual, says, "She is not wrong," through a mouthful, and my aunt says something in Italian about my father that I will not repeat, and Rosalie looks from face to face trying to work out where the joke is.
She never finds it.
That is what I cannot stop watching. She is not playing this. She has no idea what is happening. A woman who can hold silence for six hours under professional pressure is standing in a back room being liked, by accident, and it is going through her like weather.
At one point somebody hands her a plate.
Directly. Into her hand. Some child, some eight year old belonging to somebody, comes past with a plate of the fried things and holds it up at her without a word, and she takes it.
She takes it.
She has not taken anything out of a hand in nine days and she takes it off a child without a flicker, and eats one, standing up, in a room with thirty people in it, and does not appear to notice she has done either.
I have to go and stand in the hall for a minute.
Before that, though, there is the thing with Bregman's cousin.
Her name is Lieve and she is married to one of the Bregmans and comes to this house four times a year and takes everything home in a bag. She has been circling for an hour. She waits until Rosa has released the elbow and then she is in, smooth as a card going into a deck, with a glass in one hand.
"You must have been terrified," she says. "Marrying into all this."
"No."
"Well. You are very brave."
"No."
Lieve laughs the way you laugh when a joke has not happened. "And what does your family think of it? They must have had something to say."
The room is loud. Nobody is listening except me and Lieve and, four feet away with a bowl of olives, my brother, who has gone very slightly still.
Rosalie looks at her.
"I do not have one," she says.
"Oh, I am sorry."
"Why?"
"Well, because." Lieve does a small helpless thing with the glass. "Everybody has somebody."
"No," Rosalie says. "That is not true, and you know it is not true, and you said it because you wanted to know something and you did not want to ask for it. So ask for it."
The nearest three conversations do not stop.
Lieve's mouth opens and closes.
"Ask for it," Rosalie says again, perfectly pleasantly, in exactly the same flat voice she used for the wine and for Dario, and I realise with something cold going down the back of my neck that she is not being clever.
She has no idea she is being frightening.
She has simply run out of the ability to see why a question would be asked sideways.
"I only meant," Lieve says.
"I know what you meant."
Aunt Rosa arrives at that moment with a plate of the almond things and says, "Lieve, move, you are in the way of the door," and it dissolves, and Lieve goes out to the kitchen and does not come back into the room for the rest of the afternoon.
Teodoro comes and stands next to me with his olives.
"Do you want the number," he says.
"What number."
"On the note."
"I am not going to encourage this."
"Nine," he says happily, and eats an olive. "It was a look. Cesare, that woman is going to go home and tell four people your wife threatened her, and none of them will be able to explain what she actually said, which is the single most useful thing that has happened to this family since March."
"You are not enjoying this," Teodoro says, finding me there.
"I am enjoying it enormously."
"You are standing in a hallway on your own next to a coat rack."
"I like the coat rack."
He leans against the wall beside me with a plate. Through the doorway Rosalie is being shown a photograph album by my aunt Rosa, who has got her by the elbow, and she is looking at it with the expression of a woman defusing something.
"Look at her," Teodoro says.
"I have been."
"Six days ago she came up the north wall to kill you and now Rosa is showing her Papa's confirmation." He eats something. "Do you want my honest professional assessment?"
"No."
"Two forty seven."
"What?"
"Times Rosa has said 'and this is Cesare at nine' to a woman who does not know what a confirmation is," he says.
"That was a joke. My honest professional assessment is that whatever you told me on that pier was true and it was not the answer, and I have decided I do not need the answer, because I have watched you look at the doorway of this room fourteen times in an hour and a half and you have not once looked at the exit. "
I look at him.
"That is what you do," he says. "In every room, since you were eleven.
You find the door. You find it every time you walk into a space, you have done it in front of me ten thousand times, and today you have been finding her.
" He straightens up off the wall. "So. That is where we are.
I am going to go and eat, and I am not going to say anything else about it, and I want you to know that I am being extremely restrained. "
"Teodoro."
"Extremely."
On the way home she is quiet for eleven minutes.
I let her be. The streets go past wet and orange, and the heater is doing its noise, and she is sitting with her hands in her lap looking out at nothing, and I have learned in nine days that when she is quiet like this something is being assembled.
Then she says, "What is a birthday for?"
I keep my eyes on the road.
"Say that again."
"There was a cake," she says. "It had a name on it.
Someone called Elena. Everybody sang, and it took about forty seconds, and it was not very good, and then they cut it and gave it out and went back to arguing about the christening.
" She turns her head. "I know what a birthday is.
I am not stupid. I know it is the day you were born and I know people have them. "
"But."
"What is it for."
I drive.
There is a version of this where I say something reassuring and get us both home.
There is another version where I tell her the truth, which is that it is not for anything, that it does not achieve anything, that it exists so that once a year a room full of people who cannot say a sentence will stand around a cake and say it that way instead.
"It is a receipt," I say.
She turns all the way round in the seat.
"What?"
"You said the rose is a receipt. Proof of delivery, so the file closes.
" The lights go green. "A birthday is the same shape.
It is thirty people in a kitchen for forty seconds once a year, confirming that somebody is still here.
That is the whole of it. It is a very bad cake and a very short song and it means: we have checked, you are still here, the file is open. "
She does not say anything.
I risk a look.
She has gone absolutely still in the way she goes still, and she is looking straight ahead through the windscreen, and her hands have come off her lap and are flat on her thighs.
"When is yours," she says.
"The fourth of June."
"Thirty four."
"Thirty five, in June. Try to contain yourself."
"And Teodoro's?"
"October. And Nonna's is in February and she refuses to have it and we do it anyway."
"And Ines's," she says.
The car does not swerve. I want that on the record. The car does not swerve, and I do not brake, and my hands do exactly what they are doing.
"The ninth of March," I say.
"Do you do it?"
"Yes."
"Even though."
"Yes."
Rosalie looks out of the window at the wet street going past.
"Then it is not a receipt," she says. "You cannot file it. Nobody has confirmed anything."
"No."
"So what is it for?"
"It is not for anything," I say. "That is what I should have said at the start. It is a room full of people refusing to close a file."
She does not ask me who Ines is.
She has had it in her hand for nine days, she has been told the name three times now, and she is a professional, and it would cost her nothing at all to say the five words.
She does not say them.
We come down onto the river road and the wipers go and the building comes up on the right with its six floors and its bad lift, and she is looking out of the window with her jaw set, and I understand that she has decided to wait for me.
Nobody has ever waited for me.
I park in the yard and turn the engine off, and then I sit there with my hands on the wheel in a stationary car with the engine off, which I have not done since I was eleven years old, and I do it for four minutes, and she lets me.