Chapter 29
CESARE
Nothing happens on the sixth of December.
I want to put that at the top because it is the only day this year that qualifies, and because I have been over it so often since that I am frightened of wearing it out, and because when I am eighty I expect I will still be able to walk through it room by room.
Nobody dies. Nobody arrives. Bregman does not telephone. The ports run themselves for one Sunday and I do not think about them once.
It is a Sunday and it rains all day and there are five of us in a house.
Nonna arrives at eleven with a bag of things she has decided we do not have, and it turns out we do have all of them, and she puts them in the cupboards anyway in the wrong places.
"That is not where the flour goes."
"It is now."
"Nonna, it has gone where the pans go."
"The pans are in the wrong place," Ottilie says, "and have been since your mother, and I have not said anything for twenty six years and today I am saying it."
Teodoro loses a bet at half past twelve.
The bet is about whether the woman on the second floor of the building near the market is called Marta or Marina, and it is with Petar Ilic, who comes on the first Sunday of the month and has done since before I was born.
She is called Marina.
Petar does not gloat. Petar takes the four notes off my brother and folds them and puts them in his top pocket and pats it, and then eats his lunch with an expression of enormous private satisfaction, and Teodoro says, "You have known that for forty years," and Petar says, "Forty three," and eats a potato.
"Have you spoken to her?"
"No."
"Petar."
"I have bought a paper in that shop four days a week since 1981," Petar says, "and she knows how I take my change, and that is a great deal more than most people manage, and I would thank you all to leave it."
Ottilie says, "You could ask her to a funeral. There is always a funeral."
"Ottilie."
"It is a good way in. There is no obligation and there is food."
We eat for two hours.
That is the whole of the middle of the day, and I could not tell you now what was said in most of it, which is the point.
Rosalie sits at the end of the table with the coat on the back of the chair beside her, and she eats in front of five people, and nobody remarks on it, and Ottilie does not turn round once because she does not have to any more.
Petar asks her about the rifle.
"Nine hundred and forty," she says.
"For a rifle?"
"For that rifle."
"What is the barrel?"
And they are off, and it lasts thirty five minutes, and Teodoro puts his head in his hands, and I sit at the other end of my own table and watch a seventy four year old man and a contract killer argue about steel while my grandmother clears plates around them.
Here is the argument about the film.
It starts at four, in the small room at the back with the fire that smokes, and it is about a film that neither of them has seen.
Rosalie has not seen it because she has seen four films in her life. Teodoro has not seen it because he fell asleep in it, twice, in two different decades, which he maintains does not count as not seeing it.
"It is about a boat," Teodoro says.
"You said it was about a war."
"It is a war and a boat."
"Then it is about a boat in a war, and you told me at lunch that the boat sinks in the first ten minutes, so it is about a war."
"The boat comes back."
"Boats do not come back."
"This one does," Teodoro says, "it is the point," and Rosalie says, "Then you have seen it," and Teodoro says, "I have not seen it," and Rosalie says, entirely flatly, "You know that the boat comes back."
There is a pause of about four seconds.
"Yes," Teodoro says.
"So you have seen it."
"I have not seen it, I have been told about it, there is a difference."
"There is no difference."
"There is a very large difference and I am going to explain it," my brother says, and does, for eleven minutes, and loses, because he is arguing against somebody with no social sense whatsoever who simply keeps saying the same true sentence at intervals until he runs out.
She wins.
She wins by being wrong about films and correct about one thing, extremely confidently, at a volume that never changes, and at the end of it Teodoro says, "Fine. FINE," and goes to get more wood, and Rosalie looks at me across the fire with an expression I have never seen on her.
"Did I do that right?"
"You have destroyed him."
"That was the correct outcome?"
"That was the correct outcome," I say.
At five she asks me to teach her something.
That is how she puts it. Not show me and not how do you. She comes into the kitchen where I am doing nothing in particular and stands there and says, "Teach me something," in the voice of a woman requesting a form.
"What sort of something?"
"Anything. Something you know that I do not."
"That is a very short list and you are on the wrong side of it."
"You can cook four things," she says. "I can cook nothing. I have eaten out of a pot in a room with eight other people for nineteen years and I have never once made anything that another person then ate."
So I teach her the eggs.
It takes forty minutes and it should take nine. She approaches a frying pan the way she approaches a building. She wants to know the temperature and she wants a number, and I do not have a number, and this is genuinely the worst argument of the entire afternoon.
"How do you know when it is hot enough?"
"You look at it."
"That is not a method."
"It is the method."
"There is a temperature at which it is correct," Rosalie says, "and you know what it is, and you are not telling me because you have never had to say it out loud, which is not the same as it not existing."
She is completely right and I have no answer, and Ottilie says, from the doorway, without looking up from her book:
"Butter. When the butter stops making a noise."
It works.
She does it four times and the fourth one is good, and she stands over a frying pan in a kitchen at half past five in the afternoon on a Sunday with a wooden spoon in her hand, looking at it.
"That is not going to be enough for five people," she says.
"No."
"I will do it again."
"Rosalie, we ate at one."
"They can have it anyway," she says.
And they do. All four of them, at half past six, out of politeness and then, in Teodoro's case, out of genuine enthusiasm, and Petar has two, and Ottilie has a small one and says it is very good and does not turn her back to eat it, and Rosalie stands at the end of the table with the pan still in her hand and watches four people eat a thing she made.
She does not sit down for the whole of it.
I do not say anything about that. I sit at my own table with eggs in front of me and my wife standing at the end of it holding a frying pan like a woman at a door, and I eat every bit of it.
Nonna puts salt in her coffee at six.
Everybody sees it. That is the thing. She stands at the counter and picks up the salt and does it in front of four witnesses in good light, and then sits down and drinks it.
"You have done it again," Teodoro says.
"I have not."
"I watched you."
"You watched me put sugar in my coffee, which is what I did, because I have been telling one from the other since before the war." She drinks some. "It is very good."
"Nonna."
"It is a lovely coffee."
At seven Rosalie goes up for something and Ottilie starts on the plates and I get up to do them and she says, "Sit down," and I sit down.
Then she says, with her back to me and her hands in the water:
"She is eating."
"Yes."
"In front of people. All of them, today. She did not do that in November."
"No."
"Do not make anything of it," Ottilie says. "I am only telling you what I saw."
And then, at nine, she says the thing.
We are clearing up. Rosalie is drying, badly, because nobody taught her that either. Teodoro is asleep in the chair with the fire smoking at him. Petar has gone.
Ottilie is putting cups away, and she says, over her shoulder, in exactly the voice she uses about flour:
"It has not sounded like this in here since Ines."
Nobody says anything.
Rosalie keeps drying. I put a plate in the cupboard. Ottilie shuts a door and goes on to the next cup.
I want to be very precise about what happens in me at that moment, because of what it turns out to be worth.
What happens is: nothing.
It is a warm sentence in a warm room from an old woman clearing up, and it lands the way that sentence has landed a thousand times in this house, which is: somebody has said Ines out loud and the room takes a breath and then goes on, and I feel the small familiar pressure behind the eyes and I put a plate away and it passes.
I do not hear the tense.
She said it has not sounded like this in here since Ines, and she is a woman who has spoken this language for fifty nine years and gets it wrong on purpose about half the time, and my grandmother does not make that mistake, and I have been back to that sentence more times than I can count, and I did not hear it that night.
Not one of us heard it.
Rosalie is drying a plate.
At half past ten I take a cup of tea up to a woman who is on the roof in the rain.
She is in the terrible chair with her feet up under her and a blanket, and the rain is coming down on the gravel and it is not romantic, it is unpleasant, and she has been up here for twenty minutes.
"There is a whole house," I say.
"I know."
"With a fire in it."
"That smokes." She takes the tea off the arm where I put it. "I came up to check something."
"What?"
"Whether I would want to come down."
I sit on the parapet in the rain.
"And?"
"I came up after nine minutes," she says. "Which is not the point. The point is I have been up here twenty and I have wanted to go back down for eleven of them, and I have made myself sit here to see how long it would take before I did not want to any more, and it has not happened yet."
She drinks the tea.
"It is not going to happen, is it," she says.
"No."
"That is what I thought."
We go down at eleven.
Teodoro is still asleep in the chair. Nonna has gone up. The fire has gone down to almost nothing and the room is warm and there are four glasses on the table and somebody's shoes in the middle of the floor.
Rosalie stops in the doorway and looks at it.
"What," I say.
"Nothing."
"Rosalie."
"I am doing the thing where you look at a room," she says. "Not for exits. I did the exits at eleven o'clock this morning without meaning to and then I did not do it again all day, and that has never happened, and I have been trying to do it on purpose ever since and I cannot make myself."
She puts a glass on the tray.
"This is a good room," she says.
That is the whole of the sixth of December.
Nothing happened. I have gone through it end to end more times than is good for a man and there is nothing in it: a bag of flour in the wrong cupboard, four notes in a top pocket, an argument about a boat, a woman drinking salt in front of witnesses, my brother asleep with his mouth open.
And a sentence about a room, said in the wrong tense, by somebody who does not get tenses wrong.
I did not hear it.
I want that on the record, in my own words, before anything else happens: on the sixth of December I stood four feet from my grandmother in a warm kitchen with a plate in my hand, and she told me, and I put the plate away.