Chapter Forty-One #3
There is a hollow under this floor. There is a cement screed poured over it in 1911 by somebody who thought he was doing a good thing, and under that screed there is a terrazzo laid in 1604, and I know what is under it because I have read her survey, because I have read every document that woman has produced about this building, at night, in a rented flat, the way another man would look at photographs.
Terrazzo alla veneziana, extant beneath 1911 screed, condition unknown. Removal by hand only. 40 min/m2. Estimated 420,000 EUR / 11 months / specialist crew (Vicenza). REMOVED FROM SCOPE 11 May, N.L.
She signed that variation with her own hand and then she went and stood in the loggia for six minutes with her back to the room and I watched her do it and I said nothing, because that is what I do.
There is a tool store by the gate.
I know where the key is because I have watched Marco put it back on the nail sixty times.
I take a lump hammer and a brick bolster and a bucket and a folded sack, and I take a hat off the peg and I put it on before the line, and I go back into the sala grande at seven minutes past ten at night with tools in my hands for the first time in my life.
I have signed the book. I have written the date in the box.
I kneel down on the sack in the corner by the north wall, because if I am going to destroy something I would rather destroy it in a corner.
And here is what I know about taking a screed off a terrazzo.
I know that you go in at an angle. I know that the bolster is held low and that the screed comes off in flakes and that the flakes want to come, that a bad bond is your friend, that the whole method is a matter of persuading a thing to do what it was already going to do.
I know all of it. I read it nine times in a rented flat. I have read the method statement of the best conservation architect in Italy and I have committed it to memory the way I used to commit a term sheet to memory, and I know exactly what to do.
I have never held a hammer.
I want that on the record, because it is the truest sentence in this chapter.
I am thirty eight years old. I have signed for a hundred and ten million euros.
I have never in my life put a nail into a wall, and I have never hung a picture, and when a tap in my flat in London dripped I telephoned a woman in an office and she sent a man.
I set the bolster. I hit it.
The hammer comes off the head of the bolster and takes the skin off the back of my left hand between the first and second knuckle, and the bolster goes over on the stone with a noise that fills that room to the ceiling, and I kneel in the corner of a ballroom with blood coming up out of my hand and my ears ringing.
I pick it up. I do it again.
Second time it bites, and a piece of the screed comes away about the size of a saucer, and I feel it come, and for a moment in that room I am a man who has done something.
Then I look at what is under it.
There is a piece of marble in the flake. It is in the underside of the flake, white and grey and about the size of a thumbnail, and it is not in the floor any more, because it is in my hand.
I sit back on my heels.
I have been on this floor for six minutes and I have taken a piece of a four hundred year old floor off it and put it in a bucket, and it cannot be put back, and there is no putting it back, she wrote that, she wrote it in a survey in her own hand, a machine will take the marble out with the cement and there is no putting it back.
And I am the machine.
I sit on my heels in the dark in a corner of the sala grande with a lump hammer in my hand and I understand, in a completely flat and orderly way, that I have just done to a floor exactly what I have spent four years doing to everything else, which is to be certain that I had read the document.
A voice says, “Give it to me.”
Ilaria is standing in the doorway.
She has her coat on and her bag over her shoulder and she has come back for something, and she is twenty nine years old and she is going to have this practice one day and I have known that since the third week.
“Give me the bolster,” she says.
“Ilaria.”
“You have taken marble out with the cement. I heard it. I heard it from the yard, I heard the note change, and you cannot hear the note change because you have never done it, and you are going to kneel there and do it four hundred more times tonight because you are a very stubborn man and you have decided to be sorry.”
She comes across the stone.
She puts her hand out and she stands over me with her hand out, and I am on my knees on a sack in front of a woman fifteen years younger than me, and I give her the bolster.
She looks at the flake in the bucket. She turns it over. She does not say anything about it, which is worse.
“The screed is bonded in patches,” she says. "It is dead near the door and it is welded along that wall, and you have started on the welded part, because it is the corner, because you wanted to be tidy about it. That is the single worst place in this room and you have picked it.
“Rosa has the survey. Rosa knows every hollow in this floor because she tapped the whole of it in May with a stick, and she will give it to you, and she will give it to you because I am going to ask her, and neither of us is going to tell the signora, and I want you to understand what I am doing.”
“I understand what you are doing.”
“You do not,” Ilaria says. "I am not doing it for you.
I have never done one thing for you in thirteen weeks and I am not going to start on a Tuesday.
That floor is the best floor in Milan and there is going to be a machine in this room by Christmas, and you are the only person on this earth who is stupid enough to be standing between it and a machine.
“So you are going to do it properly.”
She takes her coat off.
She takes her coat off and she folds it over a trestle and she rolls her sleeves and she kneels down on the stone next to me at a quarter past ten at night, in a building she does not own, next to a man she has never once addressed by name.
“Hold it lower,” she says. “You are chasing it. Do not chase it. Set it and let the hammer do it. And when it rings hollow you go in and when it rings dead you leave it, and you are going to spend the first hour learning what the two of them sound like and you are not going to take a single flake off, and if you take one flake off before I tell you, I will take the tools off you and put them back in the store and I will not give them back.”
I put the bolster on the floor and I tap it.
It rings dead.
“Again,” Ilaria says.
I do it for an hour.
I do it for an hour without taking anything up, on my knees on a folded sack, tapping a floor with a piece of steel and listening to it, in a room where four hundred people were once going to be let in through a door.
At half past eleven she stands up and puts her coat on.
“Three meters,” she says. "That is what you will get tonight if you are honest. And you will not get three meters, you will get one, and your hands are going to open up in about two hours and there is nothing on this site that will help you, and you are not to put anything on them from the first aid box, because it is for the men.
“Sign out when you go.”
She goes as far as the doorway.
“I did not trust you with the bolster,” she says, without turning around. “I was right.”
Then she goes.
And I kneel down in the middle of four hundred and eleven square meters of floor in a building I am about to lose, and I set the steel, and I listen for the hollow, and the church strikes twelve somewhere out over the roofs of Milan.
Night one.
I get one square meter and I lose two nails and I take the marble out three more times, and at four in the morning I sit on the stone with my back against a trestle and my hands hanging over my knees, and I look at what I have done, and it is one meter, and it is white and grey and a red the color of an old brick, and it has not seen a light in a hundred and fourteen years.
There are two hundred and fifty nights in this floor.
I have not got two hundred and fifty nights.
I have not got twenty. On Friday a receiver takes this building and I will never be allowed through that gate again, and there is no version of the arithmetic in which I finish it, and I have done the arithmetic, because I always do the arithmetic, and that is the whole trouble with me.
I get up.
I go out to the trestle table at the gate, and I turn the book around under the lamp, and I sign myself out at four eleven, and I put the pen down parallel to the edge.
And in the box that says purpose of visit there is one word, in my own hand, from ten o’clock, and it says what it says every day, and it is a date.