Chapter Fifteen
The site opens at six forty.
I am there at six ten, because I am always there at six ten, because the first half hour of a building belongs to me and I do not share it.
That is not sentiment. A building tells the truth in the cold.
Come at ten, when the sun has been on the south wall for three hours and the men have been walking on it, and it will lie to you like a politician.
At six ten the Cassaro Palazzo is thirty five hundred square meters of dark stone with its mouth shut.
“Thursday,” I tell it.
Then I go up.
The scaffold in the sala grande is four lifts high and I climb it on the outside, which is against every regulation I enforce on other people. At the top there is a working deck twelve meters above the floor, and above the deck, at the distance of a raised arm, there is the vault.
Four hundred and twenty two years old. Painted architecture, columns that are not there, a balustrade that is not there, and a sky behind all of it with a hole in the middle of the sky where the light comes through, and if you lie on your back on the boards, which I do, which I am doing, the room goes up forever.
Nobody knows who painted it.
That is the thing about that ceiling. There is no name.
There is a payment in the Cassaro accounts in 1604 for pigment and for the board and lodging of a man from Cremona, and the man from Cremona put a sky over a room in Milan and then he walked out of the record and nothing else of him survives on this earth.
I have loved that ceiling since I was twenty two years old.
I lie under it in the dark with my hands folded on my chest like a woman in a tomb, and the light comes up out of Via Cassaro through the shutters in bars, and at six thirty five I get up and go down and put on my hat, because at six forty the gate opens and I become somebody else.
Marco has the book on the table by the gate. The site book. Everybody signs. I signed it. The Superintendency signs it. If the Pope came to my site he would sign the book and he would put his hat on before he went past the line.
At six fifty two the gate goes and Adrian Kastellanos walks onto my scaffold.
He is not in the coat. That is the first thing.
He is in a jacket and a pair of boots that are new, and the new is the only vulgar thing about him, because they are the correct boots, steel toe, proper sole, and somebody has bought them in the last thirty six hours and he has not thought to scuff them.
So he is standing at the gate of a four hundred year old building in a pair of boots that are lying about him.
He has a hard hat in his hand.
He is holding it the way a man holds a hat in a church.
I let him stand there. I am twelve meters away with a clipboard, and he knows I have seen him, and I finish what I am doing, which is nothing, which is reading a schedule I memorized on Sunday.
Then I walk over.
“Mr. Kastellanos.”
“Mrs. Lindqvist.”
Nobody has ever called me that. It is not a thing anybody says.
He has taken my name, my real name, the one I put back on like a coat, and he has put a Mrs. in front of it and handed it to me at six in the morning, and it is not a joke and it is not a claim.
It is a man putting something on a table and stepping back from it.
I do not react.
“There are rules,” I say.
“Yes.”
“You have not heard them.”
“There are rules,” he says.
I take a breath. Marco has stopped moving by the gate. Marco has developed, over six days, a talent for standing exactly far enough away to hear everything.
“One. You sign the book. Every day, in and out, like every other body on this site, and if it comes down you will be in that book and the fire brigade will know to look for you.”
“Yes.”
“Two. The hat goes on before the line and comes off after the line. There is no exception for chief executives, there is no exception for weather, and if I see it in your hand you go home.”
He puts it on. He does it immediately, in the middle of my sentence, and he does not adjust it the way men adjust them. He just puts it on and lets it sit there badly, and he waits.
“Three. You do not touch anything. Not the fabric, not the props, not a bucket, not a tool. If a thing is on the floor of my site it is on the floor of my site because somebody put it there for a reason.”
“Yes.”
“Four. Anything you want, you ask Marco. Not me. Marco is the foreman, Marco owns the site, and if Marco tells you to get off it you will get off it and you will not tell me about it afterward.”
“Yes.”
“Five.” I look at him. “You know five.”
“I do not speak to you,” he says, “unless it concerns the structure.”
“Say it properly.”
He does not blink. “I do not initiate communication with the principal architect on any matter not directly concerning structural or fabric integrity.”
He has it word perfect.
Of course he does. I wrote that clause in a corridor with my heart going like a hammer and I typed it nine minutes later in a car park, and he has it word perfect at six fifty two in the morning in a pair of boots he bought yesterday.
“Then sign the book,” I say.
He signs the book.
I watch him do it, because I am a bad person. He writes his name in the visitors column in a hand I have not seen in four years, and it has not changed, the K is still that thing he does with the K, and under purpose of visit he writes one word.
Observation.
Then he walks past the line and stands where I have told him to stand, which is nowhere in particular, which is the point, and he does not move for six hours.
Here is what I learn on the first day.
He does not sit. There is a stack of pallets by the south wall that every human being who has ever entered this building has sat on, including a cardinal, and Adrian Kastellanos stands on a stone floor for six hours in new boots and does not sit down, because I have not told him he may.
He does not touch. At nine forty a bucket goes over on the second lift and a liter of lime putty comes down the boards and stops eight centimeters from his foot, and he looks at it and puts his hands behind his back.
He does not speak to me.
He speaks to Marco. He says, “Where should I be.” He says, “May I go up.” He says, at eleven, “Is there anywhere I am in the way,” and Marco, who has known him for six days and has already decided something about him that I have not asked about and am not going to, says, “You are not in the way, capo,” which is a word Marco uses about six people on earth.
He does not look at his phone.
That is the one that gets under the door.
I am on the fourth lift at half past two with a hammer and a photograph of a vault, and I look down through the boards and he is standing in a bar of light in the middle of the sala grande with his head back, looking at a ceiling, with his hands behind him.
His phone is in a pocket in a jacket in a building where four thousand two hundred people are waiting for him to make a decision, and he is watching my ceiling.
At four o’clock he is still there.
At six, when the light goes and the compressor stops and Marco is calling the men down, he is still there, and he has not eaten, and I know he has not eaten because I have watched every hour of his day the way you watch a crack you have put a glass strip across.
I come down the ladder cage like a person who obeys her own rules.
He is at the gate. He has taken his hat off and he is holding it, on the correct side of the line, and he is waiting to sign out, and Marco has taken the book to the office. So he is standing there with his hat in his hands like a man at the back of a funeral.
“Sit down,” I say.
He looks at me.
“There is a chair in the office,” I say. “There are pallets. There is a wall, Adrian. There is an entire building. You have been standing on a stone floor for nine hours.”
“You did not say I could.”
“I did not say you could breathe.”
“You did not put breathing in the contract,” he says, and it is not funny, and he does not say it as though it is funny. He says it the way you read out a figure.
The yard is very quiet. Somebody is banging a scaffold clip on the east range, and a moped goes past in the street, and the light is going the color it goes.
“That is not a rule,” I say. “Sitting down. It is not a rule. I did not make it a rule.”
“Everything you say is a rule,” he says.
He says it without any weight at all. He says it the way you say the tide comes in at four.
And I stand in the gateway of a building I have wanted for twelve years and I understand what I have done.
I have taken a man and put him inside a box, and I have made the box out of my own hands, and every side of that box is a thing I said, and he is not pushing on any of them.
He is standing in the exact center of it with his hat off.
I could have fought him for thirteen weeks. I was ready. I had the whole thing built.
You cannot fight a man who has already stopped.
“Sit down,” I say again, and my voice is not right, and I hear it, and so does he. “That is a rule. It is a new rule. You sit down when you are tired.”
Adrian Kastellanos looks at me for a moment.
Then he goes and sits on a pallet by the south wall of a building he owns, in his new boots, with his hat on his knee, like a workman at the end of a shift.
And I have to walk away from him across a stone floor at speed, because I have just given a man permission to rest, and it came out of my mouth soft, and it landed on him like a hand.