Chapter 12
CESARE
Signora Vitale has been dressing this family since my grandfather, and she is eighty one, and she does not care who I am, and I have watched her tell three separate men to stand up straight in a tone that made all three of them do it.
She takes one look at my wife and says, in Italian, "Who cut this hair."
"I did," Rosalie says.
Signora Vitale stops.
"You speak it?"
"No. But capelli was in it and you were looking at my head."
The old woman turns to me with an expression of profound satisfaction.
"This one," she says, "I like."
Here is what we are doing and why.
Thursday is Sadko's. Sadko's is the room where this family is seen doing business in public, and on Thursday there will be a table with Bregman at it and Nunzia at it and eleven other people who will all be looking at exactly one thing, which is whether the woman who came through my window has been given a coat or a costume.
There is a difference. Everybody in that room will know it on sight.
A costume says: he has dressed a problem up. A coat says: this is a person who lives in my house and gets cold.
So we are here, in a first floor room on a street behind the market, with three walls of fabric and a mirror on a stand and Signora Vitale's granddaughter making coffee in the back, and I am sitting in a chair by the window with my hat in my hands like a man in a waiting room.
Rosalie is standing on a low box in the middle of the floor.
She has been standing on it for nine minutes and she has not moved once.
"Arms."
Rosalie puts her arms out.
"Down. Not like that. You are not a scarecrow, you are being measured. Down and easy."
The arms come down and easy.
"Now." The tape goes round her ribs and Signora Vitale's hands stop. "Ah."
"It is stitched."
"I can see that it is stitched, I have eyes. Who stitched it."
"He did."
Signora Vitale looks at me over her glasses for a long moment. Then she says something to Rosalie in Italian, at length, with her hands going.
"What did she say?"
"I have no idea."
"She said," Signora Vitale says, without looking round, "that a man who sews like that should not be allowed near a woman, and that if he does it again he should come to me first, and I will show him, because I did four of them in the war and I did not lose one."
"That is not what you said. That was thirty seconds long."
"It is what I said."
"You said something about my mother."
"Yes," she agrees. "That also."
She takes eleven measurements and calls out every one to the granddaughter, and Rosalie stands on the box in the middle of it with her arms down and easy and her face doing nothing at all, and I watch her from a chair eight feet away and I understand about four minutes in that she is having a very bad time.
Not frightened. She is not frightened of an eighty one year old woman with a tape measure.
It is the being handled.
Every measurement is a hand on her. Shoulder, wrist, ribs, waist, the length from the seventh vertebra to the floor.
Signora Vitale does not ask, and does not announce, and does not set anything down and step back, because she is eighty one and she has been putting her hands on people since 1962 and it has never once occurred to her that this requires a permission.
And Rosalie stands there and lets her.
She lets a stranger touch her eleven times in nine minutes without moving, and I sit in a chair by a window and watch what it costs, which is visible in exactly one place, which is her hands, which are open and flat against her thighs with the fingers spread, and stay that way the entire time.
I have seen a man hold a doorframe like that.
"The blue," Signora Vitale says. "Not the green. The green is for a woman who wants to be looked at and this one is going to be looked at whatever we do, so we will not help them." She is already unrolling it. "Cesare. Out."
"I am in a chair."
"Out. She is going to take her shirt off and you are her husband, which means nothing to me, I have known you since you were in a pram and you had a terrible face."
"I will turn round."
"You will go and stand on the landing."
I go and stand on the landing.
The landing is four feet wide and has a window at the end of it and a photograph of a wedding in 1971 on the wall, and I stand there for twenty minutes and get through about nine of them before the granddaughter comes up with the coffee and finds me.
Her name is Chiara and she is nineteen and she has known me since she was born and is not remotely frightened of me.
"You are doing that thing," she says.
"What thing."
"Where you stand in a corridor." She puts the tray on the sill. "Papa does it at the hospital. When Mamma was in. You stand in the corridor because in the corridor nothing has happened yet."
"Chiara."
"I am only saying."
"You are nineteen."
"And you are in a corridor," she says, and goes back down the stairs.
I look at the wedding photograph for a while longer.
It is my grandparents. It is Nicolo and Ottilie outside a church in 1971, ten years after the margin, and she is laughing at something out of frame and he is looking at her instead of at the camera, and the photograph has been on this wall my entire life and I have walked past it four hundred times.
I have never once wondered what she is laughing at.
It takes twenty minutes.
Then the granddaughter opens the door and says, "She is ready, but the back," and goes off down the stairs, and I come in.
Rosalie is standing in front of the mirror on the stand.
The dress is dark blue and it is not a costume.
It is the plainest possible thing, long sleeves, high at the front, and it does nothing at all except fit, and that is the entire point, and Signora Vitale is a genius and knows it and has gone off to the back room to be a genius somewhere else on purpose.
The back is open from the shoulder blades down and there are eleven small covered buttons and none of them are done.
"It does not fasten," Rosalie says.
"It fastens."
"I cannot reach it."
"No," I say. "That is a feature of the design and it is why she has left the room."
I do the buttons.
I say it first, because I always say it first: "I am going to start at the bottom and work up, and I am going to have to touch your back."
"Yes."
"Say if."
"Yes."
The first button is at the base of her spine and the loop is stiff because it is new, and it takes me two goes, and my hands are not steady, which is becoming a theme.
She is looking at me in the mirror.
That is the thing about a mirror. There is nowhere to put your eyes. I am standing behind a woman doing up eleven buttons on a dress, and directly in front of both of us there is a mirror on a stand, and she is watching me the entire time.
Second button.
The scar on her ribs is on the other side, but there is another one across her left shoulder blade that I did not know about, old, thin, silver, about four inches, and I do not say anything about it.
There is a mole under the third button. Her back is warm and there is a place at the base of her neck where her pulse is going considerably faster than a woman standing still in a room has any business doing.
Fifth button.
"You are being very quiet," she says.
"I am concentrating."
"On buttons."
"On eleven buttons, in a row, on a garment I cannot afford to damage, in front of a woman who has known me since I was in a pram and told you I had a terrible face."
"You did have a terrible face."
"You have not seen it."
"There is a photograph downstairs," Rosalie says, to the mirror, "in the frame by the door. You are about nine. You look like somebody has just told you the answer to something and you have decided not to believe it."
I get the sixth button wrong twice.
At the eighth she says, "Stop."
I stop instantly, with my hands off her, both of them, half a step back.
"What?"
"Not that." She has not moved. She is still looking at me in the mirror and her hands are down at her sides and open, flat, fingers spread. "Not stop. I meant." Her jaw works. "I do not know what I meant."
"All right."
"Do it again."
"Rosalie."
"Do the button."
I put my hands back on her back and do the eighth button, and neither of us pretends, and that is the part I keep coming back to afterwards.
Nobody says this is nothing. Nobody says there, done.
Nobody laughs and makes it small. I do the ninth button and the tenth button and the eleventh, and the room is entirely silent except for the granddaughter downstairs saying something to somebody about a delivery, and when it is finished I do not step away, and she does not step forward, and we stand there in front of a mirror with my hands still resting where the last button was.
Eight seconds.
I counted. I count everything.
"There," I say.
"Yes."
Neither of us moves.
"You know I am still under contract," she says.
Her eyes are on mine in the glass and her voice has not changed at all.
"Yes."
"Do you want to know the date?"
The room is very warm. Somewhere below us a door goes.
"No," I say.
"Why not?"
Because I set the date. Because I paid three instalments through four intermediaries and the last one cleared in March, and there is a folder in a safe with four words of mine inked inside the cover.
The woman in front of me in a blue dress, with eleven buttons done up by my hands, is stage two.
I am the reason she is in this room at all.
"Because you would tell me," I say, "and then it would be a fact in the room, and I would have to do something about it, and I am not ready to do anything about it."
"That is not a good reason."
"No."
"You are the head of a family."
"Yes."
"You should be doing something about it."
"I am aware," I say, "of what I should be doing."
She turns round.
She does it slowly, inside my arms, without asking, and it puts her about ten inches away with her back to the mirror and her face up at me, and I have not been this close to her when neither of us was bleeding.
"Then do not," she says.
"Do not what?"
"Do anything about it."
And Signora Vitale opens the door.
"The hem," she announces, to the room, at volume, "is wrong, and I have known it was wrong since Tuesday, and I will not have it said that I let a woman out of this house with a hem like that," and she is across the floor and down on her knees with a mouthful of pins before either of us has moved a muscle.
Rosalie steps back onto the box.
I go and sit in the chair by the window.
And Signora Vitale, on her knees with pins in her mouth, does not look up at either of us, not once, for eleven minutes.