Chapter Twenty-Three
Ines does not ask me anything for the first forty minutes.
That is her method and I have never once caught her at it.
She simply arrives at the bar on Via Solferino at half past eight, orders a Negroni she does not want and a plate of something she will not eat, and talks.
She talks about the Genoa job. She talks about a tax inspector.
She talks for forty minutes about a man she went to dinner with in April who owns a vineyard and pronounced the word terroir nine times in one evening, and she does it with such committed nonsense that I have my elbows on the bar and my second drink half down before I understand that I have been operated on.
“Say it,” she says.
“Say what.”
“Whatever it is that has been sitting on your chest since Thursday.” She turns her glass. “You have not shouted at me in six days, Nora. You shouted at me twice a week for twelve years and then a ceiling came down and you went quiet, and I have been sleeping badly.”
“A quarter of the intonaco is on a crash deck in a hundred and forty trays,” I say. “That is what is on my chest.”
“No.”
“Ines.”
“That is on your chest, yes. You have been on the telephone to the Superintendency every day at eight and you have written a nine page method statement and you have already found a woman in Bologna who can do the reintegration, and you did all of that in seventy two hours, and it is not what is sitting on you.” She looks at me sideways.
“You have washed that shirt three times.”
I put the glass down.
The bar is loud. It is a Friday and the whole of Brera is out and there is a man behind me telling a story with his hands, and I am sitting on a stool in a bar in the city I chose, with money in the bank and a building I have wanted for twelve years, and my hands are perfectly steady, and I say it.
“He went up the outside of the scaffold.”
“I know.”
“Four lifts. He is thirty six years old and he was wearing a suit jacket and he came over the top rail like a boy in a shipyard and he put his back to it.” I turn my glass a quarter, the way she does, and I catch myself doing it.
“And he lay on top of me under a hundred kilos of a ceiling that a man from Cremona painted, and he made a joke, and I laughed.”
Ines does not say anything.
“I want you to understand that I am not confused,” I say. “I know what I felt. I felt what anybody would feel. It is a body on top of your body when the roof is coming down, it is a bicycle mechanic’s reflex, it means nothing.”
“Nora.”
“It means nothing, Ines.”
“Then why have you washed the shirt three times.”
And that is the thing about being loved by a woman like Ines Ferrari for ten years. There is no floor in it. You go down and down.
I look at the bottles. There is a green one on the top shelf with the label coming off, and I look at it, because if I look at her I will not be able to say this in the correct order, and I have been putting it in the correct order in my head for four years and I have never once said it out loud.
“Everybody thinks it was the recording,” I say.
“Was it not.”
“No.” I put both hands around the glass.
“The recording was a splice. I knew it was a splice inside of six seconds, because I have listened to that man on the telephone in the next room for fourteen months and there is a breath he takes before the second half of a sentence and it was not there. I stood in that ballroom with four hundred people looking at me and I thought, that is a cut. Somebody has cut that.”
Ines has gone very still.
“And Celine Marchetti,” I say. “Everybody thinks it was Celine Marchetti walking through the doors in a green dress and sitting down in my chair. And I want to tell you what I actually thought when I saw her, because I have never told anybody. I thought, she does not know where to put her hands.”
“What?”
“She came through the doors of a room with four hundred people in it and she was holding her own elbow.” I hear my voice go flat and I let it.
"I had been the mistress in nobody’s story, Ines, and I still knew.
A woman who has just taken a man from his wife does not walk into that room holding her own elbow.
She was frightened. She was somebody’s furniture and she had been carried in.
“So no. It was not the recording, and it was not the woman.”
“Then what,” Ines says.
“You are going to be disappointed.”
“I have been your partner for ten years, Nora. I have been disappointed on an industrial scale.”
I look at her, and she is not smiling, and that is the kindest thing she does.
I have rehearsed this. That is the part I am ashamed of.
I have said it in a car and I have said it in a shower and I have said it once to a ceiling in a hotel in Palermo at three in the morning during a conference I did not need to attend, and every time it comes out too big, it comes out like a speech, and the truth of it is not big at all.
The truth of it is about twelve meters.
The man behind me finishes his story and everybody laughs, and there is a burst of it, and it goes through the middle of what I am about to say like weather through a hole in a roof, and I wait for it, and it passes.
“It was thirty feet,” I say.
“Nora.”
“Thirty feet. I have measured it. I have measured that room a hundred times in my head and it is not a metaphor, it is twelve meters, it is the width of my sala grande, and I could have thrown a glass at him.” I am not crying.
I want that on the record. My eyes are dry and my hands are steady and I could put a needle through a window opening tonight.
"There was a folder on the table in front of me. There was a microphone with his mother’s hand on it.
There were four hundred people, and every single one of them turned their head, at the same time, like birds, and they did not look at her. They looked at him.
“They were waiting.”
I take a drink and it does not taste of anything.
“That is what nobody understands,” I say.
“The room was on my side, Ines. For about four seconds, that room was on my side, and every person in it was waiting for the man at the head table to stand up. They wanted him to. It was the best thing that was going to happen to them all year. And he had thirty feet and he had four seconds and he had everything he needed, and I found his eyes.”
Ines has put her drink down.
“He looked back at me,” I say.
“Nora.”
“He looked back at me and I watched him do the sum.”
I say it slowly, because I have never said it, and because I want to get it exactly right, and because it is the only true sentence I own.
“He looked at me,” I say, “and he decided I was survivable.”
Ines does not speak.
“That is what he did. He did not choose her. He did not fall in love, he did not lose his head, he did not get drunk at a conference in Rotterdam and do a stupid human thing that I could have hit him for and then, God help me, forgiven, because I could have forgiven that, I have thought about it and I could have forgiven that in about a year.” My throat closes and I open it.
"He sat in a chair and he looked at me across thirty feet and he ran the numbers, and he worked out what it would cost him to stand up, and he worked out what it would cost him not to, and he found that he could survive losing me.
"He was right. He did survive it.
“And so the last thing I ever got from my husband, the actual last thing, was the answer to a question. What am I worth. And he did not lie about it, Ines. That is the obscene part. He did not lie. He sat there and he told the truth in front of four hundred people without opening his mouth, and the truth was, she is bearable. I can carry this.”
The barman comes and I put my hand over the glass.
“You cannot come back from being the cheaper option,” I say. “There is nothing to come back to. A man who cheats has done a thing to you. A man who prices you has told you what you are, and he has been correct, and you have to live the rest of your life inside his valuation.”
Ines is quiet for a long time.
Then she says, and she says it very carefully, the way you go down a ladder in the dark, “And Sophia?”
“What about Sophia.”
“You have just told me,” Ines says, “that the worst thing a person can do is look at somebody and decide they will manage without them.”
And the bar goes on being loud around me.
I look at my hands on the counter. The left one, the thumb, the white line the chisel put in it when I was nineteen and my father did not stop working and did not call a doctor, he simply put his hand around it and held it shut and said, keep going, Nora, it is only skin.
“She has never asked me for him,” I say. “She has asked me what a father is. She has never asked me for one.”
“That is not an answer.”
“No.”
I pick up my coat.
“Four years ago I sat in a taxi at the airport in Bergen at six in the morning,” I say, “and I put my hand on my stomach, and I looked at a man’s name on my telephone, and I did the sum, Ines.
I did the exact sum he did. I sat there and I worked out whether my daughter could survive without her father. ”
Ines does not move.
“And I decided she could,” I say. “And I have decided it again every single morning for four years, at about ten past six, before the kettle.”