Chapter Forty-Three
I hear it before I know what it is.
I am on the fourth lift at twenty past eight in the morning, on my back on the boards with a lamp on my chest, working a lacuna in the northeast quarter with Rosa Vanetti’s crew fifteen feet away, and the compressor is off because the compressor is always off when Rosa is on a lacuna, and so the yard is quiet.
And a man’s voice comes up out of the yard.
It comes off the stone of the loggia and up the face of a four hundred year old building and into a hole in the sky, and it says:
“Do it properly or do not do it at all. And send the transcript to Ellis so it can be minuted.”
I put my hand flat on the boards.
I do not do anything else. I lie twelve meters over a stone floor on my back with a lamp on my chest and I listen to my husband’s voice in my own yard, and then I hear another voice, a young woman’s, four years younger than a woman who has cut her own hair, and she is talking about acoustic panels.
They have put it on the site speaker.
The site speaker is a plastic thing on a bracket over the tool store that Marco uses for the radio and for telling twenty two men that a load is coming through the gate, and somebody has plugged a telephone into it, and there are men standing in my yard at twenty past eight in the morning listening to a boardroom in London.
I come down the ladder too fast.
I do it in the way I have told every man on that site I will remove them for doing, hands on the stiles and boots on the outside of the rungs, and I land in the yard and there are nine of them standing around the tool store with their hats in their hands like a congregation, and Marco is at the back with his arms folded, and every single one of them turns around.
And they look at me.
That is the thing. I want it written down exactly, because I have been looked at by rooms before. I was looked at by four hundred people once and I got up off a chair and I walked the length of that room with my head level and I have been living off the muscle of it ever since.
This is not that.
Twenty two men who have called me signora for thirteen weeks, who have watched me win a Superintendency officer and lose a ceiling, who have never once given me an inch that I did not take with my own hands, are standing in my yard in the morning looking at me the way you look at a woman coming out of a hospital.
“Turn it off,” I say.
Nobody moves.
“Turn it off.”
And Marco says, “Signora,” and I go past him and I take the cable out of the speaker with one pull and something plastic breaks and I do not care, and the yard goes silent, and my husband’s voice stops in the middle of a word about a table.
I stand there with a cable in my hand.
“It is on the front page of every newspaper in Europe,” Marco says, behind me. “Signora. It is on the machine in the bar. Nuccia has it on the machine in the bar.”
“Get back on the scaffold.”
“Nora.” That is Ilaria, and she has never once used my name, not in three years, and she is standing at the gate with the sign-in book open in her hands like a woman holding a hymnal.
“There are two of them on Via Cassaro with cameras and one of them has been here since seven and he asked me if I was you.”
“Then he is not very good at his job,” I say, “and neither are you, because the scaffold firm are due at nine and I do not see a permit on that table.”
Ilaria’s face does not move.
She goes and gets the permit.
I go back up the ladder.
I work.
I want to be accurate about this, because everybody is going to want a scene and there was not one. I go back up onto the fourth lift and I lie down on the boards and I work a lacuna in an intonaco laid in 1604 for six hours and I do not come down.
At half past ten Rosa Vanetti comes along the boards on her hands and knees with a tray and she puts it down beside me.
Rosa is sixty one years old. She has been in this trade since she was seventeen and she has taken a Tiepolo off a wall in Bergamo and she does not read newspapers and she would not care if she did.
She does not look at me differently.
That is the only mercy I get all day and it nearly finishes me.
She kneels on the boards next to me and she puts her thumb on the edge of the lacuna and she says, “This is dead. You are working a dead edge, it will not take, and you have been at it for two hours.”
“It will take.”
“It will not take, and you know it will not take, and you have been going at that edge since half past eight because it is a thing you can do with your hands.” She sits back. “Consolidate it and leave it. Come back Thursday.”
And then Rosa Vanetti, who has said perhaps forty words to me in thirteen weeks, lifts the tray.
Number sixty three. Nine fragments of a four hundred year old sky in a bed of sand, and my hand comes out for it and my hand is not there.
It is not shaking. It is worse than shaking. It goes out and it does not close, and the tray comes away from Rosa’s fingers and starts to go, and it is going to go over the edge of the boards and twelve meters onto a stone floor.
And Rosa’s hand comes under it.
She does not say anything. She puts the tray back down on the boards and she squares it, and she takes her hands away, and she does not look at me.
“I will do the northeast,” she says. “You will go down.”
I go down.
Ines is in the site office.
She is sitting on the corner of my desk with her coat still on, and she has come from Genoa on the seven o’clock, and there is a folder on my desk and she has her hand flat on it.
“Forty one,” she says. "As of this morning it is sixty eight. The Times, the Corriere, two from Athens, one from a woman at the Guardian who has written to me three times and who is the only one of them who has bothered to spell Lindqvist correctly.
“They all want the same thing. They want a comment from the wife.”
“How long have you had them.”
“Since Monday.”
“How long, Ines.”
Ines Ferrari takes her hand off the folder.
“The first one came in March,” she says.
And I stand in my own site office in my work boots with lime on my forearms and I say a thing to a woman who has held my company together for fifteen years that I am not going to write down, and I say it loudly enough that Marco hears it in the yard, and Ines lets me finish.
Then she says, “Are you done.”
“No.”
“Then go on, because I am not moving, and there is nowhere else for you to put it.”
I put both hands on the desk.
“They have given it back,” Ines says. "It is uncut. It is sixty one minutes on a company website with a transcript and Ellis’s minute sitting next to it, and there is a statement above it that says the nine words were removed and that Celine Marchetti did not do it and that everything said about her is false.
It does not mention him. There is nothing in it that he can hide behind.
It is the cleanest document I have ever read from a company in my life and I have read four thousand of them.
“You are not a woman whose husband humiliated her in a ballroom any more, Nora. As of seven o’clock this morning you are a woman who was lied about.”
“I know what I am.”
“You do not,” Ines says.
I go out at six.
Via Cassaro at six in the evening in the middle of July, and it is a hundred and ten meters to the bar on the corner and I walk it, and a woman comes off the pavement outside the tobacconist and puts her hand on my arm.
I have never seen her before in my life. She is perhaps fifty. She has a shopping bag and a lanyard from somewhere, and she stops me on a street in Milan with her hand on my arm and her face has gone soft, and she says:
“I am so sorry.”
I look at her hand on my arm.
“For what,” I say.
And she cannot say it. She stands on a pavement holding a bag of shopping and her mouth opens and she cannot say the sentence, because the sentence is I read about you for four years and I believed all of it, and nobody says that out loud, and she has not come to say it, she has come to be forgiven for it, and she has picked me to do it.
“Take your hand off my arm,” I say.
I say it quietly. I say it in the voice I use on a Superintendency officer.
She takes her hand off my arm and she goes, and she is going to tell somebody about me tonight, and she is going to say that I was cold.
I get Sophia from Giulia at half past seven.
And Giulia, who is sixty eight and who taught for thirty four years and who can hear a lie in her sleep, opens the door with my daughter on her hip and does not say one word about any of it, and hands me a child and a bag and a plastic dinosaur with a missing leg, and says, “She would not eat the fish. Nobody has ever eaten that fish. I do not know why I go on making it.”
And that is the only decent thing that happens to me all day.
I put Sophia to bed at half past eight.
She has her legs up the wall. She has my father’s forehead, and she is four years old, and she says, “Mamma, why did the men in the yard have their hats in their hands.”
I sit on the edge of a child’s bed in a flat in Milan.
“Because they were listening to something,” I say.
“What.”
“A man talking about a table.”
She thinks about this seriously, with her legs up the wall, and she decides it is not interesting, and she is entirely right.
Then I go into the kitchen and I put both hands on the counter and I stand there in the dark for a long time.
Here is the part I am not going to be gracious about.
Every single one of them, all sixty eight of them, in three languages, on the front pages of newspapers in six countries, has written the same sentence, and the sentence is Adrian Kastellanos spoke at length about his then wife.
The wife.
I am thirty three years old. I have taken a ceiling off a wall in Cremona and put it back.
I have won nine Superintendency hearings and lost two, and I have a hundred and forty trays of a four hundred year old sky in a locked room a hundred and ten meters from where I am standing, and I built a practice out of nothing in a country that is not mine with a child on my hip and a name I chose myself.
And they have given me back a name I stopped using on the ninth of November.
They did not give me anything today. They took the lie off me, and they handed me the thing that was underneath it, and the thing underneath it is that I was somebody’s wife in a room.
I am going to have to build the rest of it myself.
Again.
I turn the tap on and I run my wrists under it until they hurt, because they have been shaking since half past eight this morning and I have not let them, and now there is nobody in the room.