Chapter Thirty-Three
Eleni Kastellanos signs out of my gate at twenty past nine in the morning.
She does it properly. She puts the time in the column and she draws a line under it, and she puts the hat back on the pile with the crown up, and she goes out into Via Cassaro and gets into a car that has been waiting on a double yellow for fifty minutes, and it goes.
I stand in the yard.
The compressor is running. I can hear that again now. There is a bird on the third lift and it has gone.
Bruno is looking at me across the yard with a coil of airline in his hands, and when I turn my head he becomes extremely busy, and so does everybody else, and twenty two men in a courtyard in Milan pick up their tools at the same time like an orchestra.
I go inside.
I have a building. That is what I have. I have four hundred and twenty two years of stone and a hole in a ceiling and a woman from Bologna twelve meters up in the air with her hands white to the wrist, and I am the principal, and there are seven decisions waiting for me before lunch, and I know how to do this, I have done it every day since I was twenty three, I have done it through a divorce and a birth and seven fevers, and I know exactly how it goes.
You put your hand on the work and the work holds you up.
It does not hold me up.
At ten past ten I am on the third lift of the scaffold and I have stopped, and I do not know how long I have been stopped.
I am standing on the boards with one hand on the standard, and I am looking at the underside of the ceiling of the sala grande, at the raw brick where the sky came off, and the brick is the color of a wound and I have looked at it every day for six days and today I cannot make it mean anything.
He did not sleep with her, you know.
I go up.
At twenty five past ten I am at the trays.
There are a hundred and forty of them and they are laid out in rows on the deck in the order they came off, and every one of them has a slip of paper in it, and every slip of paper has a number on it in my hand.
Rosa Vanetti is at the far end with her back to me, working, and she has been working since ten past eight and she has not said one word to a human being.
I pick up tray 71.
It is a plastic tray about the size of a baking sheet and it weighs almost nothing, and there are seven pieces of intonaco in it and one of them is the size of my palm and it has a corner of a cloud on it, gray going to cream, and a line of shadow that a man from Cremona put there with a brush in 1604 and did not sign.
I turn it toward the light.
And my hands let go.
There is no reason for it. There is nothing wrong with my hands.
My hands have held a needle in a window opening at twelve meters in a wind and they have held a chisel through the whole of a night with a nineteen year old girl’s blood in the handle of it and they have not let go of anything in their lives, and on a Monday morning at twenty five past ten on a crash deck in Milan the tray goes out of them.
It hits the boards on its edge.
It does not shatter. That is the thing. It is worse than shattering.
It hits on the edge and it turns over slowly, the way a thing turns over when there is nothing you can do about it, and seven pieces of a four hundred year old sky go out across the scaffold boards, and one of them goes into the gap between two boards and stops, and the palm sized one, the one with the cloud on it, goes flat on the deck and breaks into three.
The whole site hears it.
It is a plastic tray on scaffold boards twelve meters up in a stone room and it is not a loud sound and it goes everywhere, into the vault, off the sky, and comes back down.
Nobody says anything.
I go down on my knees.
I am on my knees on the boards of my own scaffold in front of a hundred and forty trays with my hands out, and I am picking up pieces of a ceiling with my fingers, with my bare fingers, which is the one thing, the one single thing, that I have told every human being on this site never to do, and I have said it in three languages and I have written it in a method statement and I have taken a man’s tools off him for it.
And Rosa Vanetti is beside me.
She has come down the deck without a sound.
She kneels down, sixty one years old, with a knee that does not like it, and she takes a soft brush and a card out of her apron, and she puts the card flat on the boards, and she brushes the fragments onto the card one at a time, and she does not touch a single one of them with her hands.
She does the one in the gap with a pair of tweezers.
She puts them all in the tray. She squares the tray. She reads the slip of paper in it, and she looks at the pieces, and she takes a pencil out of her apron and she writes something on the slip, and she puts the tray back in the row in the correct place, at 71, between 70 and 72.
Then she looks at me.
She looks at me for a long time. She is kneeling on a board about half a meter away and she has white lime to the wrist and dust in her eyebrows and she is looking at my face the way she looks at a wall, from the side, with the light across it, to see where it has come away from what is behind it.
She does not say one word.
She gets up, using the standard, and she goes back to her end of the deck.
I go down the ladder cage in the correct manner on the correct handrail and I go to the toilet block and I put my hands under the tap and I leave them there for a very long time.
At twenty past one Ilaria comes and finds me with a reading.
She has come off the deck and she has the gauge log in her hand and she is holding it open with her thumb, and there is a number, and she has walked the length of a building to give it to me.
“Point six at the east bracket,” she says. “It was point four on Tuesday and it has been point four every day since and today it is point six.”
“And.”
“And I am telling you.”
“That is not what I asked you.” I do not know that I am going to say it until it is out. “I asked you and. You have brought me a number. Bruno can bring me a number. The lad from Cremona can bring me a number, he can read a gauge, he is nineteen. What does it mean, Ilaria.”
She goes still.
“I think it is the temperature.”
“You think.”
“It was twenty three degrees on Tuesday and it is twenty nine today and the sun has been on the south face since eight.”
“Then say that.” My voice is doing something I have not given it permission to do and it is not loud, it is worse than loud, it is flat and it is precise and it goes right across a stone room.
“Say that first. Say the meaning and then say the number, because if you cannot tell me what a number means then you are a thermometer, and I have got one of those at home, and I do not need to pay a thermometer four thousand euros a month.”
And nine men hear it.
Every single one of them. There is a room with a stone floor and a barrel vault in it and it carries sound the way a church carries sound, and Marco is at the door with his hat in his hand and he has heard it, and Bruno has heard it, and the boy from Cremona is standing on the second lift with a bucket and he has heard it, and Rosa Vanetti twelve meters up has heard it.
Ilaria Conti stands in front of me with a gauge log open on her thumb.
She does not cry and she does not answer and she does not look away.
“Yes, Signora,” she says.
And she closes the log, and she goes.
And I stand in the middle of the sala grande under a hole in a ceiling and I know, with total clarity, in the same second, that the woman who took a Superintendency inspector up four lifts of scaffold six days ago while I was on a bathroom floor with a bucket in my lap has just been called a thermometer by me in front of the entire site, for bringing me a correct reading, on time, with a correct explanation, that she gave me before I had finished the sentence.
At five o’clock I go and find her.
She is in the site office with the log and she stands up when I come in, and she does not have to, and she does.
“The point six,” I say. “It is the temperature. You were right.”
“Thank you, Signora.”
“Ilaria.”
“The log is up to date,” she says. “The nine o’clock and the three o’clock are in. I will do the six.”
And she waits, politely, with her hands at her sides, for me to leave her office.
At half past six she brings me the gauge log and she puts it in my hand.
I am standing by the trestle table in the sala grande and it is nearly dark and the lamps are on, aimed up, throwing everything upward, so that the room is bright at the top and dark at the bottom, and I am standing in the dark part.
I take the log. I open it.
There are three columns of figures on that page in her small handwriting and there is a note at the bottom in green biro from the lime man, and I have read that log every single evening for six weeks and I have found four errors in it in six weeks and I have found them because I read every line.
I look at it for about two seconds.
I sign it.
I put my name at the bottom of a page I have not read, in a building I have loved for twelve years, and I hand it back, and my hands are steady, and my hands are the last honest thing I own and they have been lying to me all day.
Ilaria takes the log.
She looks at the signature. She looks at the page. She is twenty nine years old and she has just watched the principal architect of the Cassaro restoration sign a gauge log in under two seconds, and she knows exactly what it means, and she knows better than to say so.
She shuts the book.
“Goodnight, Signora,” she says.
And she goes out through the sala grande under a ceiling painted by a man from Cremona whose name is written nowhere on this earth, and her boots go across four hundred years of floor, and the gate goes.
At half past eight I am alone in a building with four hundred and twenty two years in it, and I sit down on the bottom step of the scaffold, and I say it out loud.
“She is lying.”
The building does not argue with me. That is the thing about buildings. They let you.