Chapter 15
ROSALIE
The registry office takes nine minutes and is the least interesting thing that has ever happened to me.
A woman behind a counter. A form with my name on it, which is not my name, and his name, which is.
A date that is not the date, because the real one was eleven days ago on the old weighing floor, and this piece of paper says today, which means the state of this country now believes I got married on a Thursday in a municipal building with a rubber plant in it.
I sign it.
I do not make an X, because I have practised.
Four nights, on the roof, in the terrible chair, with a pen and the back of a delivery docket, and I have got it down to something that does not look like a child did it, and when the woman behind the counter turns the form round I put Rosalie Orsini on the line in one movement without stopping, and it takes about two seconds, and nobody in the room reacts at all.
Cesare is standing beside me.
He does not say anything about it, and he does not look at the signature, and he does not look at me, and I know for a fact he has seen the whole thing because his hand goes flat on the counter for a second, which is what his hands do.
"Right," Teodoro says outside. "Photograph."
"No."
"Yes."
"Why."
"Because there is a wedding photograph of every single person in this family on a wall in the house on Vroom Street," he says, "including Marco's, twice, and if there is not one of you by Christmas then Lieve tells four people, and I have a camera, and Nonna has already booked the back room at Sadko's, and you have a dress. "
"I have a dress for Thursday."
"You have a dress for Thursday and today is Thursday."
I look at Cesare.
"He is correct," Cesare says. "I did try to stop it. I want that recorded."
The back room at Sadko's has a window on one side and a bad brown wall on the other and Teodoro spends eleven minutes deciding between them.
"The window."
"It is behind us. We will be black."
"Then the wall."
"The wall is brown, Teo."
"Everything in 1974 was brown and those photographs are the best ones in the house," Teodoro says, and moves us to the wall, and takes four, and looks at them, and moves us back to the window.
Ottilie is sitting in the corner in a chair somebody has brought her, with her handbag on her knees, watching.
She has not said anything for twenty minutes.
Here is the problem with being photographed.
Every photograph that exists of me is a photograph of a rose on a body, and there are forty seven of them, and they are in a filing cabinet in an office in a building with a glass roof, and I have taken every single one myself.
That is the entire archive. That is the whole of the visual record of my life.
So when a man points a camera at my face and says "look at me", something in the back of my head stands up and says no, and my hands go flat, and it takes four takes before Teodoro puts the camera down and says, entirely without joking:
"All right. You look like a hostage."
"Yes."
"Do you want to stop?"
"No."
"Because we can stop."
"I want it," I say.
And I hear it come out and it is the most honest sentence I have said in this country and there are four people in the room.
It takes forty seven takes.
Teodoro counts them out loud because he is Teodoro, and by twenty he has abandoned any pretence of directing and is simply talking, at volume, continuously, the way he did in the lift on the first day, and I work out somewhere around thirty that he is doing it for exactly the same reason.
"Twenty nine. Cesare, you look like a man at a bus stop."
"I am standing still."
"You are standing available. Put your hand somewhere."
"Where."
"Anywhere. It is a wedding photograph, not a police lineup. Her waist. Her shoulder. Anywhere that is not that."
Cesare says, out loud, to me, in front of his brother and his grandmother and a waiter carrying chairs:
"I am going to put my hand on your back."
"Yes."
"Say if."
"Yes."
He puts his hand on my back.
The dress has eleven buttons in it and his hand goes flat between my shoulder blades over the fourth and fifth of them, and I stand absolutely still, and Teodoro says "thirty," and takes it, and then says nothing at all for about four seconds, which has never happened before.
Then he says, "Right," in a completely different voice, and takes seventeen more.
Ottilie cries at forty one.
I do not see it happen. I hear the handbag come open and I hear the noise a person makes when they have decided not to make one, and I turn my head, and she is sitting in a chair in the corner of a restaurant back room with a handkerchief and her glasses off, at a wedding she arranged herself, to a marriage she knows is a legal instrument.
"Do not look at me," she says. "Look at the camera. Teodoro, do not put that in the photograph."
"I am not going to put you in the photograph."
"You put Rosa in the christening one."
"That was an accident."
"You did it on purpose because she said the thing about your ears," Ottilie says, and blows her nose, and puts the glasses back on. "Go on. Take it."
The print comes back on Saturday.
Teodoro brings it up to the roof himself, in an envelope, and does not stay, which is not like him, and I sit in the terrible chair and take it out.
I look at it for a while.
Here is what is in it.
There is a man in a dark suit standing slightly turned, with his hand flat between the shoulder blades of a woman in a dark blue dress, and he is not looking at the camera, he is looking about six inches to the left of it, which is where her face is.
And there is a woman.
She is smaller than I expect. That is the first thing.
She is standing with her weight even and her hands at her sides, open, flat, fingers spread, and her chin is very slightly up, and her hair is cut blunt at the jaw and it is not a good cut, and there is a woman in Ghent somewhere out of frame telling somebody not to photograph her.
The woman in the picture is not doing anything with her face.
But she is not looking at the camera either.
She is looking at the man.
I sit on a roof in the cold and I cannot work out who she is supposed to be.
That is the honest report. I have looked at a lot of photographs of people who did not know they were being photographed and I am good at reading them, and I look at this one for eleven minutes and I cannot do it.
If somebody handed me this print in an office and said find her, I would say: mid twenties, fit, right handed, has been hurt on the left side recently because of how she is standing, does not like the camera. Married. Recently. Look at the hand on her back.
I would not say: asset.
I would not say it because it is not in the picture.
There is no version of this woman in any file anywhere, and she has been standing in a restaurant in a blue dress for the last four days without my knowledge, and I have no idea what to do with her.
He comes up at seven with two coffees and finds me with it in my hands.
"They are good," he says.
"Yes."
"Teodoro is unbearable about it. He has told four people he is a photographer."
I hold it out.
Not to him. I put it down on the chair arm, and take my hand off it, and step back, which is a thing I have watched somebody do about thirty times now and which I have apparently learned.
He looks at that for a second longer than he needs to.
Then he picks it up.
"Do you want it," I say.
"There are three prints. One is going on the wall on Vroom Street and one is going to Signora Vitale, who will pretend she does not want it." He turns it over. Then back. "This one is yours."
"I do not have anywhere to put it."
"No," he agrees.
And he takes a pen out of his inside pocket, and he crouches down and puts the photograph flat on the chair arm, and writes on the back of it.
It takes about six seconds.
Then he stands up, and sets it down, and steps back, and says, "There," and goes and sits on the parapet with his coffee and does not watch me pick it up.
On the back, in ink, in a hand I have not seen before, there are two lines.
The date.
And under it: Rosalie Orsini.
That is all. No message. No my wife and no love and nothing that anybody could ever use, because he is not a stupid man and this is a photograph of a woman with forty seven files.
Just the date, and a name that is not mine, written by somebody else, for the first time in my life.
I stand on a roof holding a piece of card.
The letters are cramped and slightly backward leaning and the R has a long tail on it that goes under the o, and the two lines are not level with each other, because he wrote them on the arm of a garden chair in the wind.
"It is not your name," he says, from the parapet, without turning round.
"No."
"I am aware of that."
"Then why did you write it."
"Because it is the one you have," Cesare says, "and somebody should have written it down before now."
I put it in the inside pocket of the jacket with the hole in the side.
At two in the morning I am on the roof on my own with the phone in my hand and the print on my knee and I have the camera open.
That is the habit.
Nineteen years. You photograph the thing, and you send the photograph, and the file closes. It is the only thing I have ever done with a camera and my thumb is already moving and the print is on my knee in the light off the phone, and I have the frame lined up before I understand what I am doing.
I stop with my thumb on the button.
I sit there for a long time.
Then I turn the phone off. All the way off, which has not happened since I was seventeen, and I put the print back in my inside pocket, and I go down the ladder in the dark.
The hatch squeaks.
Below me a man who is not asleep hears it, and knows I am coming, and stays exactly where he is.