Chapter Twenty-One
I get nine steps into the yard.
That is as far as I get. Nine steps from the door of the sala grande, past the mixer, past the skip, with a shirt on me that has another person’s blood across the collarbone, and my legs stop.
They simply stop. I am not aware of deciding it.
The yard is full of men who are not looking at me.
That is what nine men look like when they have all decided at the same time to look at something else, and Bruno is coiling an airline he coiled twenty minutes ago, and the boy from Cremona has found something extremely interesting on the underside of a pallet.
Marco is at the gate with his hat in his hands.
Ilaria is beside him and she has both hands on the gate rail and she is white.
I stand in the middle of my own yard with the dust still coming out of the doors behind me, and I look at the sky over Via Cassaro, which is a blue with nothing in it, and I do the only arithmetic available to me.
There is an injured person on my site.
That is all it is. That is the whole of it. There is an injured person on my site, and I am the principal, and my name is on the license, and there is a green box on the wall of the site office with a seal on it and a number on it, and the number is mine.
I turn around and I go back in.
The first aid kit is a green plastic box the size of a toolbox and it cost thirty one euros and it has a plastic seal through the clasp that says the kit has not been opened, and I check that seal on the first Monday of every month with my own hands because I do not trust anybody else to.
I break it with my thumb.
He is where I left him.
He is standing in the middle of the sala grande under a hole in a ceiling, in the dust, with his hands at his sides, and he has not moved and he has not sat down and he has not put a hand up to his own face, and there is a line open down the side of his jaw from the ear, and the blood has come down inside his collar and gone into the shirt, and it is drying at the top and it is not drying at the bottom.
He watches me come.
“Sit down,” I say.
He sits down. There is a stack of pallets against the north wall and he goes to it and he sits down on it without a word, and he puts his hands on his knees, and he does not ask me anything.
I put the box on the pallet beside him. I take out the gloves and I put them on and I pull them straight at the wrist.
“Turn your head.”
He turns his head.
“To the light. Left.”
He turns it left.
I get the lamp. It is on a stand and it is pointing at a ceiling and I bring it down and swing it around and put the light across his jaw at an angle, because you do not light a wound from the front, you light it from the side, or you will not see the depth of it and you will find out about the depth of it in a week when it opens.
It is about six centimeters. It runs from under the ear down along the bone and it stops before the point of the chin.
It is not a cut. A cut is clean. This is a laceration and it has torn, and there is plaster dust in the whole length of it, and there is a piece of something in the lower end of it that is not dust.
“There is material in it,” I say.
He does not say anything.
I take the saline pod and I break the top off it and I flush it, and it runs pink down his neck and into the shirt that is already ruined, and I do it again with a second pod and a third, and his hands do not move on his knees.
“There is a piece of the cornice in your face,” I say.
He does not say anything.
I use the tweezers. They are steel and they are in a paper sleeve in the lid of the box and I have never used them, and I take a piece of four hundred year old lime plaster the size of a grain of rice out of Adrian Kastellanos’s jaw and I put it on the lid of the first aid kit, and it sits there, gray with a rim of cream on one side, and neither of us looks at it.
I flush it again.
“Hold still.”
He holds still.
I clean it. There is a way to clean a wound and it is from the middle outward and you do not go back over ground you have covered, and I do it with a chlorhexidine wipe in seven passes, and he does not make a sound, and I am twenty centimeters from his face and I am looking at nothing on this earth except six centimeters of skin.
I put the strips on. Six of them. You start in the middle and you work out to the ends and you pull the edges together with your thumb before you lay each one down, and my thumb is against his jaw, and the bone is under it, and there is a muscle in a man’s jaw that jumps when he is holding himself still and it is jumping under my thumb.
I lay the last strip down.
“That needs a stitch,” I say. “It will scar.”
He says nothing.
“Take the shirt off.”
He looks at me.
It is the first time he has looked at me since I came back through those doors, and I meet it, and I do not blink, and I say it again in exactly the same voice.
“A hundred kilos of intonaco landed on your back on my site,” I say. “There is an accident book and I have to fill it in. Take the shirt off.”
He takes the shirt off.
He does it slowly, because of the shoulder, and he does it without any performance in it at all, and he folds it once and puts it on the pallet beside him and sits there in an undershirt with the dust on him.
“The vest as well.”
He takes the vest off.
His back is the color of a storm coming in.
It is up across both shoulder blades and it is going down the right side toward the ribs, and it is red now and it will be black by Saturday, and there are two places where the skin has gone, a long graze across the top of the left shoulder where something came down and dragged, and a puncture below the right blade about the size of my thumbnail with a bead of blood standing in it that has not run.
I put my hand flat on his back.
“Breathe in,” I say.
He breathes in.
“Out.”
He breathes out. It is clean. There is nothing in it, no catch, no shortening, and the ribs move the way ribs move when there is nothing wrong with them.
“Again.”
He does it again.
I take my hand off.
I clean the graze and I dress the puncture, and I do it with the same seven passes and the same tape and the same thumb, and I do not say one word to him that is not about the wound, and he does not say one word at all.
He does not say thank you. He does not make a joke. He made a joke on the deck, on his elbows, with a ceiling on him, and I laughed, and he has not made another one and he is not going to, and we are both very clear about why.
At the gate, Ilaria has not moved.
Marco has not moved.
They have been standing there for the whole of it, twenty three minutes, and neither of them has come in, and neither of them has left, and Marco Belotti is sixty two years old and has been on sites since he was fifteen and he knows exactly what he is looking at, and he is not looking away, and he is not coming in.
That is what a foreman is.
I take my gloves off.
I get the accident book out of the site office and I bring it back and I put it on the pallet, and I sit down on the pallet across from him with the book on my knee and a pen, and I fill it in.
Date. Time. Location: sala grande, fourth lift.
Name of injured person.
I write KASTELLANOS, A.
Nature of injury. I write: Laceration, right mandible, approx. 60mm, contaminated, closed with adhesive strips, requires suturing. Contusion, upper back, bilateral. Abrasion, left shoulder. Puncture, right posterior thorax.
Cause. I look at that box for a while.
I write: Detachment of intonaco, northeast quarter, approx. 100kg. Injured person entered the collapse zone.
I do not write why he entered it.
Medical attention given. There is a box and there is a tick, and I tick it.
By whom.
And I sit on a stack of pallets in a building that is four hundred and twenty two years old with an accident book on my knee, and I write my own name in that box with my own hand.
N. LINDQVIST.
Then I turn the book around and I hold it out to him.
“Sign it,” I say.
He takes the pen.
He is sitting in front of me with no shirt on and six strips on his face and a sky on his back, and he takes the pen out of my hand, and our fingers do not touch, because I hold it at the far end, and he holds it at the far end, and both of us do that on purpose and both of us know that the other one did it on purpose.
He signs it.
I have seen that signature on nine million euros of contract.
It is the same signature. It has not moved a millimeter, it is the same size, it sits on the line the way it always sits on the line, and he has just written it on a pallet in the dust with a hundred kilos of a ceiling across his back and it is identical.
I look at it for longer than I need to.
Then I shut the book.
“You will go to a hospital,” I say. “Not because I am asking. Because it is in the method statement and you have signed the method statement, and if you do not go, the insurers will use it, and if the insurers use it my site closes.”
“Yes,” he says.
That is the first word he has said. It has taken twenty six minutes.
I stand up. I put the tweezers in the sharps bag and I put the gloves in the sharps bag and I close the box and I pick it up, and the piece of the cornice is still sitting on the lid, and I take it off the lid with two fingers, and I do not put it in the bag.
I put it in a tray.
There are a hundred and forty numbered trays on that crash deck and every one of them is going to Rosa Vanetti in Bologna, and I climb four lifts of ladder cage with a piece of a man’s jaw in my closed hand and I put it in tray 88, and I write it in the tray log, and I write it exactly as I would write anything.
88. Fragment, cornice, cream/gray, approx. 4mm. Recovered from injured person.
Then I go down.
He has put his shirt back on. He is standing behind his line with his hands behind his back, in a shirt with somebody else’s dust and his own blood on it, waiting to be told he may leave, because that is the contract and I wrote it.
“Go,” I say.
He goes.
Marco opens the gate for him and does not look at him, and Ilaria steps back off the rail, and he walks out into Via Cassaro without his hat, and the gate goes.
I put the first aid kit back on the wall of the site office.
The seal is broken. There is a little green plastic tag hanging off the clasp in two pieces, and the kit is not compliant now, and it cannot be signed off, and there has to be a new one on that wall before eight o’clock tomorrow morning or nobody works.
I get my phone out and I stand in the yard and I order another one.
It is a thirty one euro box. It comes in two days.
I put my name in the delivery field and my card in the payment field and I press the thing that says confirm, and then I stand in the middle of my own yard for a long time with a telephone in my hand, and my hands are steady, and there is nothing on this earth that I want to say to anybody.