Chapter Twenty-Four
The fever starts at four in the morning and I know before I touch her.
I know from the sound. There is a rhythm to a sleeping child that you learn without ever deciding to, and at four ten on the Monday the rhythm in the next room is wrong, it is short and it is high, and I am out of bed and across the hall before my eyes are properly open.
She is on top of the blanket with her arms flung out, and she is hot the way a stone is hot, from underneath, and when I put my mouth on her forehead she does not wake up.
Thirty nine point four.
I sit on the floor of my daughter’s bedroom at twenty past four in the morning in a T-shirt with the thermometer in my hand.
Here is what a fever is, when you are one person. It is not fear. I have been afraid twice in my life and this is not the shape of it. It is a series of doors closing very quietly, one after another, down a long corridor, and each door is a thing you were going to do today.
I get the paracetamol into her at half past four. She takes it and she is furious about it, in a slurred way, and she tells me the spoon is a liar, which I do not understand and never will, and then she falls asleep sitting up against me with her mouth open.
At five I do the arithmetic.
The jacks came off the manifold on Friday. The pier is back in, stainless core, four shafts reset, and the loggia has been standing on its own legs for six days and the wire on the old woman’s wall has not moved. That is done. That is the good news, and I hold it for three seconds.
The bad news is in a hundred and forty numbered trays on a crash deck twelve meters in the air.
Today is the day the woman from Bologna comes.
Rosa Vanetti, sixty one years old, the best hand in Italy with a detached intonaco, and she has come off a job in Ravenna to give me one day, and she has given me the one day because I rang her at ten o’clock at night and she liked the way I said the word Cremona.
She lands at eleven. The Superintendency inspector comes at two, and I have been building toward that inspector for nine days, and he will stand under a hole in a ceiling and decide whether my site stays open.
I look at my daughter, who is asleep on my arm and who weighs a hundred kilos.
Then I ring Giulia downstairs, and I stand in my kitchen and I listen to it ring, and it rings out, because Giulia is sixty eight years old and it is five in the morning and she is asleep like a sane person, and while I am listening to it ring I understand what I am doing.
I am ringing a retired schoolteacher on a Monday morning at five o’clock to ask her to sit with a child with a fever of thirty nine point four so that I can go and look at a ceiling.
I put the phone down on the counter.
I stand there in the dark for a moment with both hands flat on the counter, the way you stand when you have been running.
Then I ring Marco.
“Signora.” He is awake. He is always awake. Marco Belotti has been awake at five in the morning every day of his life and he does not think there is anything remarkable about it.
“Sophia is ill,” I say. “I am not coming in.”
There is a pause of exactly one second.
“How ill,” he says.
“Thirty nine four. It is nothing. It is a virus, they all have it, three of them went home from the school on Thursday.” My voice sounds like somebody else’s, brisk and light and completely calm, and I hear it and I hate it.
“Marco, listen to me. Rosa Vanetti lands at eleven. She goes to the trays first, not the ceiling, the trays, and nobody helps her and nobody talks to her, she does not like it. Ilaria takes the inspector at two.”
“Ilaria.”
“Ilaria takes the inspector at two,” I say again. “She is twenty nine years old and she has the gauge log and she is better at this than I was at thirty. Give her the method statement and stand where she can see you.”
Another pause.
“Signora,” Marco says. “The building will still be there tomorrow.”
And I stand in my kitchen with my hand over my eyes.
“Marco.”
“It has been there four hundred and twenty two years,” he says, “and it does not have a fever.”
I do not go back to bed.
I sit on the floor in the hall between the two rooms with my back against the wall and I listen to her breathe, and at some point the window goes gray, and a bin lorry comes down the street and stops and hisses and goes.
This is the part of it nobody writes down.
Not the fear. There is no fear in it. She has had a fever seven times in four years and I know the temperature at which you ring somebody and it is not thirty nine four.
It is the arithmetic that goes on running whether you want it to or not, quietly, in the dark, the way a compressor runs in another building.
If Ilaria takes the inspector and the inspector closes the site, that is not Ilaria’s fault.
It is mine. And if the site closes for three weeks the covenant fails, and if the covenant fails then four thousand two hundred people in a town in Greece I have never been to lose a gate with a name over it.
And I sit on my own floor at half past five in the morning next to a bucket and I think, why is that in my head. Whose number is that.
It is his number.
He has never said one word to me that was not about a wall, and somewhere in thirteen weeks that number has come across a stone floor and got into my house, and now it is sitting in my hall at half past five in the morning, doing sums with me.
Sophia wakes properly at seven and she is a different child.
That is the thing nobody tells you. They are not smaller when they are ill. They are stranger. She lies on the sofa under two blankets she does not want and she watches me with enormous flat eyes and she says things.
“Mama.”
“Yes.”
“My bones are too big for me today.”
“I know.”
“You do not know,” she says, with real contempt, “because your bones are the correct size,” and then she closes her eyes and goes to sleep in the middle of the sentence, and I sit on the arm of the sofa with a bowl of water and a cloth and I laugh with my hand over my mouth.
At nine she is sick on the rug.
At half past nine she is sick on me.
At ten I am kneeling on the floor of my flat in a towel with a bucket and a bottle of vinegar, and my phone is on the floor beside me face up, and it lights.
Vanetti landed. She is on the trays. She has said nothing for one hour. Marco.
Then: Ilaria has read the method statement six times. She has been sick in the yard. Do not tell her I told you.
Then, at ten twenty: Vanetti says the northeast quarter is savable. She used the word savable, Signora. I am writing it down so I do not lose it.
I sit down on the floor of my own bathroom with a bucket in my lap and I read that message six times.
And there is nobody in the flat to tell.
That is the whole of it. That is the actual shape of my life and I do not usually let myself look at it, because looking at it does not do anything, and because I chose it, and because on any other day I am not looking at anything, I am on a scaffold with a hammer.
But at ten twenty on a Monday morning a woman from Bologna said the word savable about a sky painted by a man whose name nobody wrote down, and it is the best news I have had in ten years, and I am sitting on a bathroom floor in a towel that smells of vinegar, and there is nobody in this flat over the age of four.
I ring Ines. It goes to voicemail. She is in Genoa.
I do not leave a message.
I clean the rug instead. That is what I do with it.
There is a method for sick on a wool rug and it is cold water and vinegar and patience and you do not rub, you press, and I have known it since Sophia was six months old, and I press a cloth into a rug on my knees in a towel for twenty minutes with a phone face up on the tiles beside me saying the word savable.
Then I get up, and I wash my hands, and I go and look at my daughter.
She is asleep with her mouth open and one arm hanging off the sofa, and she has kicked the blanket into a shape, and she is going to be perfectly well by Thursday, and none of this will exist. That is the other thing nobody says.
None of it leaves a mark. In six days there will be no evidence anywhere on this earth that a woman knelt on a floor in Milan and lost a day, and the ceiling will still be there, and the trays will still be there, and this will have been nothing.
It is nothing.
It is only that it is nothing every time, and it is always me.
The afternoon goes the way those afternoons go.
The paracetamol comes up at one and goes down at half past. The fever breaks at four and comes back at six and it is thirty nine one, which is better, and I write it in the back of a site notebook because that is the only pen I have, so that in among the gauge readings and the jack pressures there is now a column of temperatures.
At half past seven she is on the sofa with wet hair, eating a piece of bread with butter on it, taking it apart to get to the butter, and she is coming back. You can watch them come back.
She looks at me for a long time.
“You did not go to the building,” she says.
“No.”
“Because of me.”
“Yes.”
She thinks about this the way she thinks about everything, which is completely, and with her legs going, and it takes about nine seconds.
“Is it broken more,” she says.
“It is broken exactly the same,” I say. “There is a lady from Bologna and she says we can fix it.”
“Good.” She takes another bit of butter. Then she says, “Marco called you.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because the phone made the noise nine times and you did not swear,” she says, “so it was work.”
I look at my daughter.
She puts the bread down on the blanket, which I will find on Thursday. And she looks up at me with her whole flat serious face, hot and pale and four years old, my father’s forehead and my hands and nothing else in the world that I can name.
“Mama,” she says. “When you are sick, who sits on the sofa?”