Chapter Forty-Six #2
"You will never be late. Not one minute. And if you are late I will not ask you why, and I will not be angry, and I will simply not be there the following week, and you will stand in that gateway on your own and you will work out what happened.
“You will not ask me a single question about myself. Not one. Not how I am. Not whether I have eaten. You may talk to me about a wall.”
I write it. My hand is steady, which surprises me, and I have time to notice it and be surprised, and my writing is the writing I use on a certification, small and upright and legible to a stranger in a hundred years, because that is the only hand I have.
“And you will not tell me that you love me,” I say.
The lamp hums. There is something up in the roof space, a bird or a stone settling.
“Not once,” I say. “Not in a year. Not in five. If you say it to me I will end the hour and it will not come back, and I want you to understand that I am not saying that to be cruel, I am saying it because it is the only way this is going to be survivable for me, and I am the one who has to survive it.”
I put the pen down.
“And you will not ask me for a second hour.”
He looks at the paper for a long moment.
“Yes,” he says.
“To which.”
“To all of it,” Adrian says.
And then I get to the sentence, and I stop again.
“She will ask you,” I say. “Inside a fortnight. She will ask you in the middle of something else, when you are looking away from her, because that is when they do it.”
“Yes.”
“So there is going to be one sentence and it is going to be the same sentence every time and neither of us is ever going to improve it.”
“Yes.”
“Say what you want in it.”
He does not answer straight away. He looks at the photograph of the dog for a while.
“I am a friend of your mother’s,” he says.
“No.”
“It is the shortest thing that is not a lie.”
“It is a lie,” I say. “You are not my friend. You have never been my friend. You have been my husband and you have been the worst thing that ever happened to me and there is not one hour of the last nine years in which you have been my friend, and if you put that word in front of that child she will believe it, and then in four years she will find out what you actually are and the first thing she will learn about her father is that he opened with a lie.”
He takes it. He does not flinch and he does not agree. He waits, which is new.
“I work on the building,” he says.
“That is true and it is a hiding place, and she is four, not stupid. She will ask why you look at her.”
His jaw goes.
“She has already asked me why Marco looks at her,” I say. “Marco looks at her because he has a granddaughter in Como. She got that out of him in about a minute and a half.”
I take the pen and I write it, and I cross a word out, and I write it again, and it is the worst piece of drafting I have done in my professional life, and I have written three hundred pages of a report that a seventy one year old man will read out loud to a board.
My name is Adrian. I knew your mother before you were born. I asked if I could come here and see you, and she said yes.
I turn the book around on the table so he can read it upside down.
He reads it.
And then he says the only thing he asks me for the whole of that night, and it is not what I have braced for.
“Take out the last part,” he says.
“Which part.”
“And she said yes.” He is looking at the page.
“It puts you in it. If it goes wrong, and it will go wrong, because I am going to do it badly and she is going to work out that something is being kept from her, then that sentence is a piece of paper with your name at the bottom of it, and she will find it, and she will come to you with it.”
“That is my business.”
“It is not.”
“Adrian,” I say. “Look at me. It is exactly my business. It is the only part of it that is.”
And then I hear what I have said, and so does he, and neither of us moves for about six seconds.
“It stays in,” I say.
“Why.”
And here it is, and I have not planned this, and I am not going to pretend to myself in a book at midnight that I planned it.
“Because you asked,” I say. "You are the first person in that child’s entire life who has asked me for anything about her instead of telling me.
Her school asks me. Her doctor tells me.
My own father tells me. Ines tells me and she is right about all of it.
You came into my building with two dead fingernails and you asked, and you asked for one hour, and you put it down on a trestle table and you took your hands off it.
“And one day she is going to be twenty two years old and she is going to be standing in a room with a man who wants something from her, and I would like her to have heard, once, in her life, what it sounds like when a man asks.”
He does not say anything.
“Read it,” I say.
“Nora.”
“Out loud. In this room. Now.”
And he does.
“My name is Adrian. I knew your mother before you were born. I asked if I could come here and see you, and she said yes.”
His voice goes on the fourth word. It just goes, the way a beam goes, without any sound before it, and he stops, and he sits on the edge of my table in a gatehouse with a kettle in it and he puts it back together in front of me and I let him do it and I do not help him.
“Again.”
He looks up.
“Again,” I say. "You will be saying it to a four year old in a yard with gravel in her hand and she will be listening to about half of it, and if it comes apart in the middle she will notice, because she notices everything, and she will decide that the sentence is a frightening sentence, and she will be right, and I will not be able to unteach her that.
“So you will say it to me here until it is a thing you can say.”
He says it again.
He gets to the end of it.
“Again.”
And Adrian Kastellanos, who has closed a hundred and ten million euros across a table in Rotterdam without blinking, sits on the edge of a table in a gatehouse in Milan at ten minutes past midnight on the twenty ninth of August and says a sentence about himself for the third time, to his wife, with his hands flat on his knees, and this time he gets all the way through it in the voice he uses for a number.
Flat. Clean. No performance.
That is the voice. That is the one she can hold.
“That is it,” I say. "That is the one. Do not improve it. Do not soften it. Do not add anything to it when she looks up at you, and she will look up at you, and you will want to add something, and you will not.
“And if you ever say one word to that child that is not in that sentence, I will not warn you and I will not argue with you. There will simply not be a Thursday.”
“Yes,” he says.