Chapter Thirty-Eight #2
“You know exactly what.” I come out of the dark and into his five meters of light and I stand in front of him. “You have been waiting four years for somebody to make you say it and you have arranged your whole life so that nobody ever could. Say it.”
And Adrian Kastellanos stands in the middle of a room he is paying for and does not fight me.
“It does not matter,” he says. “I still did it.”
And there it is.
He says it evenly. He says it the way he said do it properly or do not do it at all in a boardroom on Leadenhall Street on the fourteenth of October, and there is not one gram of self pity in it, and it is not a defense, and it is not an apology, and it is the truest sentence he has ever said to me.
“How long have you known that,” I say.
“Since about four in the morning on the tenth of November.”
The rain comes on the roof.
“There is a corridor,” he says, “behind the ballroom of that hotel, and it goes down to a service lift, and there is a chair in it for the staff, and I sat in that chair from about half past one until they came to clean at six. And at four o’clock in the morning I understood that my mother had bought one evening and I had given her a life, and that nobody had asked me for the second thing, and that I had handed it over anyway. ”
“Then why.”
“Because she would have taken it back.” He says it flatly.
“The note. If I had come to you in Turin, if I had said one sentence in a newspaper, she would have called it inside a week, and four thousand people. That is the answer I have been giving myself for four years, and I gave it to myself again on Tuesday on your landing, and I am standing in this room now and I am telling you that it is not true.”
“Say the true one.”
He does not answer straight away.
“If I had come to Turin,” he says, “you would have let me in.”
The work light hums. There is a moth in it.
“That is what I could not do,” Adrian says.
"I have sat in front of men who were going to end me and I did not blink.
I have signed for a hundred and ten million euros with a steady hand.
And I sat in a car outside a building in Turin in the second year for nine hours and I did not get out of it, and I have told myself for four years that it was because I had no right, and that is a lie, and I have known it was a lie since about the fourth hour.
“It was because you open doors.”
He is very still.
“You would have opened it. You opened one for me in a lecture theatre in Rotterdam when you had no reason on this earth to do it. And if you had opened it, I would have had to stand in a kitchen and tell you what I did, out loud, in my own voice, and then I would have had to stop talking. And there is nothing after that. There is no more paper. There is a man standing in a doorway with nothing in his hands, waiting to be told, and I have never once in my life been able to do that, and I would rather have been guilty for four years than stand in that kitchen for two minutes.”
“Yes,” I say.
“Yes what.”
“You have been hiding in it.”
And that is the one that gets through.
I have hit that man with everything I own.
I hit him on a landing with seven fevers and a first word and a form with a box on it, and he stood there and took every one of them and said you are right, and I have never once got through, because he agreed with me before I opened my mouth and there is no wound you can make in a man who is already holding the knife.
I say four words in a dark building and Adrian Kastellanos goes grey.
“Say it again,” he says.
“You have not been serving a sentence.” I am not shouting.
I have never been further from shouting.
“You have been hiding in one. It is the safest place you have ever lived. You do not have to be forgiven in there, Adrian. You do not have to ask. Nobody can refuse you, and you can go on paying forever, and you will never once have to stand in a doorway and wait.”
The moth goes round the work light.
“Yes,” he says.
That is all. He does not qualify it. He stands in a room he has restored for me with a hard hat on his head and says the word yes, and he has been in this building for thirteen weeks with his mouth shut and I have finally taken something off him.
“I am not forgiving you,” I say.
“No.”
“You did not cheat on me and it changes nothing. It is worse. I have spent four years married to a small man, and this morning a woman in Turin took him away from me and gave me back the real one, and the real one sat in a chair with everything he had and set me down. He knew what I was. He said what I was out loud to a stranger in October, and he did it anyway.”
“Yes.”
“Stop agreeing with me.”
“I cannot,” Adrian says. “That is the entire problem. I have never been able to, and it is not humility, and we have both just worked out what it is.”
I stand there.
“Go home,” I say.
He goes.
He crosses the stone and he takes the hat off after the line, exactly, the way I taught him in the first week, and he puts it back on the peg, and he does not look at me, and I let him get almost to the gate.
“Adrian.”
He stops on the wet stone with the street behind him.
“When she is older,” I say. “If she asks. I am not going to tell her you were innocent.”
He stands with his back to me for a long moment.
“No,” he says. “Do not. Tell her I knew what I was doing.”
And then he is gone into Via Cassaro and there is a car door and an engine, and I am alone in a building with four hundred and twenty two years in it.
I walk over to the gate table.
I turn the book around under the work light, and I run my finger down the visitors column to the last line, and there is his name in that hand, at 23:31 on a Tuesday in July.
And in the box that says purpose of visit, he has not written a word.
He has written a date.
9 November.
I stand there in the rain at the gate of my own site for a long time.
Then I sign myself out, because those are the rules, and I write the same date under my own name.