Chapter Forty-Seven
I am at the window of the site office at twenty to six and I am not watching for him.
That is a lie, and I have decided I am finished with those, so let me do it again. I am at the window of the site office at twenty to six and I am watching for him.
He is on the corner by the tobacconist. He is not leaning on anything.
He is standing on a pavement in Milan in September with his hands at his sides, looking at the gate of a building he does not own any more, and he has been there eight minutes, and he will not come one step closer until the church strikes six.
The Cassaro went to a receiver on the Friday at ten past four, by fax.
Nine days after that the Fondazione bought it back out of the receiver for the debt sitting on it, because the Fondazione holds the covenant and because nobody else on this earth wants four hundred rooms with a hole in the sky.
Ines negotiated my fee in one afternoon and has never told me what she said to them.
So the building over my head belongs to a foundation now. The man on the corner belongs to nobody. And I have twenty two weeks of work left and a certification to sign for a client who is not him.
There is one more thing and I want it written down while I still find it strange.
The Fondazione’s insurer will not carry a non-operative on site unaccompanied after dark.
Which means that on the ninth of September I went out to the trestle table in the morning and turned the book around and wrote him into the trade column myself, in my own hand, so that a man could go on taking a floor up at night in a building that had been taken off him.
Operaio. Unqualified. Under supervision.
Marco read it upside down. He did not say one word. Then he went to the van and came back with a second bolster and put it on the shelf in the gatehouse, and I did not ask him where he got it.
Ines rang me at four o’clock this afternoon and did not say hello.
“You do not have to do this today.”
“It is Thursday.”
“Nora, it is a piece of paper in a book that you wrote yourself at midnight and you can tear it out, and I will drive over there myself and stand in that gateway and tell him it is off, and he will say thank you, because he will, because he is that kind of broken now, and that is the part I cannot stand.”
“Ines.”
“I have watched you for four years,” she said. “I have sat on the end of your bed. I am the only person on this earth who has seen you cry and you cried once and it was about a boiler.”
“I know.”
“You are not doing this for him.”
“No,” I said. “I am doing it because she asked me a question in April and I lied to her, and I have never in my life been any good at lying, and if I go on doing it she will find out one day and she will not forgive me, and she will be right.”
Ines was quiet for a moment.
“Then eat something before six,” she said, and hung up.
Giulia brings Sophia at ten to six. She has a jam jar with gravel in it, and a scab on her knee she is extremely proud of, and she has been told, by me, in eleven words, that a man who works on the building is going to talk to her for an hour.
She asked why.
I said, because he asked.
She accepted that immediately and completely, because she is four, and to a four year old that is the best reason in the world, and it went through me like a nail.
He signs in at fifty eight minutes past five.
I watch him do it from the door of the gatehouse.
He takes a hat off the peg and puts it on before the line, and he comes across the yard with nothing in his hands, not a bag, not a coat, nothing, and his hands are taped across three knuckles and there are two nails on the right one that are not going to be nails again.
The loggia is dry. There are two chairs out, mine, from the office, one of them with a cracked leg.
I stand in the doorway of the gatehouse, ten feet away, which is where I said I would be, and I hold onto the frame with one hand like a woman on a boat.
And then I watch Adrian Kastellanos, who has closed a hundred and ten million euros across a table in Rotterdam without blinking, be the worst man in Europe for fifty eight consecutive minutes.
“Hello, Sophia.”
She looks at him.
“Did you have a nice day.”
“It was a day.”
Silence. He is sitting the way he sits in board rooms, which is very straight, and he has put his hands under the table that is not there.
“Do you like school.”
“It is not school. It is asilo.”
“Do you like asilo.”
“No.”
And then nothing. He does not ask her why. Nine seconds go past, and I stand in a doorway with my nails in the paint, and I watch a man lose the thread.
“Why not,” he says, far too late.
“Matteo bites.”
“Ah.”
“He bit Chiara on the arm and he bit Pietro on the arm and he has not bitten me because I told him I would tell him a thing he did not want to know.”
Adrian looks at his daughter for a moment.
“What thing,” he says.
“I have not decided,” she says. “That is why it works.”
And there is a half second where I see it hit him, the size of what he is sitting opposite, and he does not know what to do with it, so he does the worst thing a person can do, which is that he reaches for a question out of a drawer.
“What is your favourite colour.”
“I don’t have one.”
“Everyone has a favourite colour.”
“I have a favourite floor,” Sophia says, and gets up, and walks away from him to look at the sand pile.
He does not follow her for a moment. He sits in a chair with a cracked leg in the loggia of a palace, and he puts his hand over his mouth for about two seconds, and I know that gesture, I have known it for nine years, it is the thing he does when he is grading himself and the mark is very bad.
Then he gets up and goes over and stands about two metres from her, which is too far, and he talks to her about a ship.
He does it the way he would do it to the board.
Two hundred and ninety four metres. Sixty three thousand tonnes deadweight.
Built at Perama in 1989 and the last one they built before the crane came down.
Sophia stopped listening somewhere in the second sentence and is pushing gravel out of the jar into the sand with her thumb, one stone at a time, and he keeps going, and he can hear himself, I can see that he can hear himself, and he cannot stop, and it is the single most painful thing I have ever watched a human being do.
He runs out. He stands in a yard with nothing left to say.
And Sophia, without looking up from the gravel, says:
“Why are your hands like that.”
He looks down at them as though they belong to someone else.
“I was taking a floor up.”
“With your hands?”
“Yes.”
“Why not a machine.”
“Because a machine takes the marble out with the cement.”
She thinks about this. It takes her a while. She is four and she does everything with her whole face.
“Then it is not a floor any more,” she says.
“No,” Adrian says. “Then it is a photograph of a floor.”
And I stand in that doorway and something goes through me from the top of my head to the soles of my boots, and I do not move, and I do not make a sound, and I am extremely glad that there is a wall to hold.
She talks to him for six minutes about a dead pigeon under the north scaffold. She is thorough. There is a great deal about the feet.
He does not tell her that pigeons are dirty. He does not tell her not to touch it. He does not do the voice, the terrible bright voice that men do at children, that my own father did.
He asks her one question. He says, “Where is it now.”
And she says, “Marco moved it,” and that is the end of the pigeon, and they stand next to a sand pile in silence for two minutes, and it is the first thing in the entire hour that is not a catastrophe.
At seven o’clock he stands up.
“That is the hour,” he says.
He does not ask for more. He does not look at me. He does not do the thing where a man makes a child say goodbye to him so that he can go home with something in his pocket. He walks to the line and takes the hat off, exactly, and puts it on the peg, and he signs out, and he goes.
Sophia does not say goodbye. He does not ask her to.
I hear the gate. I stand in the yard with my daughter and I breathe for what feels like the first time in an hour.
We walk home. It is fourteen minutes and she does nine of them on the low wall by the church with her hand in mine.
“That man is bad at talking,” she says.
“Yes.”
“Is he coming back.”
“Do you want him to.”
She thinks about it for the whole length of the wall, which is a long time, and she gets to the end and jumps off it and lands on both feet the way she always does.
“Everybody asks me if I am being good,” Sophia says. “He asked me what I thought was wrong with the wall.”
And I hold my daughter’s hand across Via Cassaro and I do not say one single word.
Because he did. He asked her what she thought. She is four years old and nobody in her entire life has ever done that, and I have been in the room for every hour of every one of those four years, and it was not me.