Chapter Thirty-Two
She comes on the Monday and she signs the book.
That is what I cannot get past afterward.
Marco comes and gets me at ten past nine and he is holding his hat and he says, “Signora, there is a lady,” and there is a particular thing that happens to Marco Belotti’s face when he does not understand a situation and it is happening now, and I go down through the sala grande wiping my hands and I come out into the yard and Eleni Kastellanos is standing at the gate table with a pen.
She is writing her name in the visitors column.
She is sixty six years old and she is the size of a bird and she is wearing flat shoes and a good coat that she has plainly worn in the rain before, and she has already put the hat on.
She has put it on before the line. Nobody tells her.
She has looked at the sign and she has read it and she has put the hat on with both hands, the way you put on a hat you do not want to lose.
Under purpose of visit she writes one word, and I read it upside down.
Apology.
“You will not get one,” I say.
She looks up and she smiles at me, and it is a warm smile, and my whole body remembers it. She used to give me that smile across a table with sixteen people at it and I used to feel, for about half a second, chosen.
“I am not here to make one,” she says. “I am here to receive one, and I do not expect to get it either. It is simply the only honest word for the box.”
She caps the pen and puts it down parallel to the edge of the book.
“This is a beautiful building,” she says.
“Do not.”
“The loggia is standing on nothing.” She has not moved from behind the line.
She is looking past me, up, at the north pier, and she is looking at the right thing.
“They jacketed it in cement in about 1911, I should think, and it has been drinking through that jacket for a hundred years, and somebody has taken it off. That was you. Nobody else in Europe would have taken it off.”
“Say what you came to say.”
“May I sit down? I will sit outside your line.”
She sits on the pallets. The cardinal sat on those pallets. She sits down on a stack of pallets in a yard in Milan in a coat that cost more than a man’s month, and she folds her hands, and she waits for me, and I do not sit, and after a moment I feel like a fool for standing, so I sit.
“You have twenty two men on this site,” she says, “and every one of them stopped work when I came through that gate, and not one of them stopped for me. They stopped to see what you would do. I have been in a great many rooms, Nora, and there are perhaps four women alive who can do that to a room, and I have met all four of them, and two of them were unbearable.”
“Do not do this.”
“Do what?”
“Do not be charming at me on a Monday.”
“I am not being charming, I am being accurate, and I understand that you have never been able to tell the difference between the two coming out of my mouth.” She says it without any edge at all.
“It was the same at those dinners. I told you once that your paper on the Ravenna narthex was the best thing anybody in this family had ever written, and you thanked me the way a woman thanks a customs officer.”
“Because you seated me next to men who asked what my father did.”
“I did,” she says. “Every time. And you told them. Boatbuilder. Every time, in that voice, and you watched them put the little pause in front of it, and you never once flinched, and I sat at the other end of forty feet of linen and I thought, she is going to do that for the rest of her life and it is going to take her apart at about sixty.”
“You do not get to have been on my side.”
“I have never been on your side,” Eleni says pleasantly. “I have been on yours in the way that a doctor is on your side. It is not a comfortable place to stand and nobody thanks you for it.”
She turns the hat over in her lap.
“I want to buy you the building,” she says.
I look at her.
“Not the contract, the building. The Cassaro. The freehold is held by a family in Lodi who have been trying to sell it since 1994 and are prevented by a dispute between two brothers, and I have spoken to both of them, and they will sell to me by the end of the month if I do it correctly, and I will do it correctly.” She says all this pleasantly, the way you describe a walk.
“I will buy it, and I will put it in your name, and you will finish it and it will be yours, and there will be no paper between us. You may take it and print my name in the newspaper on Friday.”
“And the child,” I say.
“There is a sum for the child.” She does not blink. “It is four million euros and it has nothing to do with my son’s deed and it will not be mentioned in it. You may put it in a bank in Bergen and never touch it.”
And I laugh.
It comes out of me before I have any say in it, and it is not a good laugh, it is loud and it is ugly and it goes up the face of a four hundred year old building and comes back down, and Marco looks over from the gate, and I put my hand up to tell him it is all right.
“You are offering me a palazzo,” I say.
“Yes.”
“You are offering me a palazzo and four million euros in a yard on a Monday morning.”
“I am offering you,” Eleni says, “the only thing you have ever wanted that a person can put on a piece of paper. I have thought about it for four years and that is genuinely the whole of my list.”
“Then your list is short.”
“It is very short. That is what I am telling you, and I would like you to hear it as the compliment it is. I have bought a great many people, Nora, and it has almost never taken me more than one line.” She holds the hat.
“You have three lines on your list and I can only reach one of them. That is why I am sitting on a pallet.”
“And you think I will take a building from you.”
“I think you will take a building from anybody,” she says. “You took nine million euros from my son and you did not blink, because the building is not a payment, the building is a patient, and you would take the money from the devil if the devil owned the roof.”
And she is right. That is the appalling thing. She is right, and she has been right about me since the first week, and I have been living in a woman’s estimate of me for four years the way you live in a house somebody else drew.
“You put my husband on a screen.”
“Yes.”
“You walked a woman into my seat in front of four hundred people while she was still holding her own elbow.” I am standing again and I do not remember standing.
“And you have come to my site with a coat and a hat and you have sat down on my pallets and offered me a building, and you think I am the kind of woman who can be bought with the correct object because you cannot conceive of a person who is not.”
She is quiet.
And then she does the thing she did in the ballroom, the thing I have never forgotten and never once been able to use, which is that she goes puzzled.
Her forehead moves. She sits there on a stack of pallets and she is genuinely, honestly confused, and it is not an act, it has never been an act, and that is the horror of her.
“Your husband,” she says.
“What?”
“You said I put your husband on a screen.”
“I said what I said.”
“Nora.” She takes the hat off. She does it slowly, and she holds it in her lap in both hands, and she looks up at me with something in her face that is very nearly pity, and it is the closest thing to gentleness I have ever received from a Kastellanos. “He did not sleep with her, you know.”
The compressor is running somewhere behind the building.
“There was nothing to sleep with,” she says.
“Celine Marchetti was a girl in a hired dress and I chose the dress, and she was paid, and she walked through a door because she was told which door, and she has never in her life been in a room alone with my son. It was theatre, my dear. It was very good theatre and it was expensive and I am not going to sit here and pretend to you that it was anything else.”
I cannot hear the compressor anymore.
“He did not betray you with a woman,” Eleni says.
“He did the arithmetic. I gave him a debt note in an anteroom thirty seconds before the doors opened, and on the other side of the sum there were four thousand two hundred people in a town in Greece with a gate with our name over it, and he sat in that chair and he added it up, and he chose them.”
Four thousand two hundred.
That number has been in my hall at half past five in the morning.
That number has been in my kitchen and on my scaffold and in the back of my site notebook next to a column of temperatures, and I have never known where it came from, and I have carried it for thirteen weeks like a stone in a coat I did not buy.
“He simply valued four thousand strangers above you,” she says, and she says it quietly, and she is not enjoying it, and if she were enjoying it I could survive it. “I would have thought that was worse.”
There is a bird on the scaffold.
I am aware of it with total clarity. There is a bird on the third lift, on the toe board, and it is doing something with its head, and behind it there is a hole in a ceiling and a hundred and forty numbered trays of sky, and a woman from Bologna is standing under it with her hands on her hips looking up.
My hands are at my sides.
Eleni Kastellanos stands up off the pallets. She puts the hat down on the top one, squared to the edge, and she takes her gloves out of her pocket.
“He has never told you,” she says.
I open my mouth.
“The gate is behind you,” I say. “You have to sign out.”