Chapter Fifty-One
They have done it beautifully.
I want that understood before anything else happens in this room, because I am a professional and I have been in four hundred rooms like it and I know exactly what has been done here.
Four hundred chairs in the sala grande of the Cassaro Palazzo, in eleven rows, on eighteen millimetre ply over felt over battens, laid by Marco Belotti and three men on Wednesday night in six hours because I told them to.
A table at the north end with five trustees at it and a jug of water.
A lectern with a microphone on a stand. The press against the west wall, thirty one of them, standing, with the cameras at the back on a rail, because the Fondazione’s press office is very good.
Ninety four square metres.
He took it up on his knees with a bolster and a lump hammer, at forty minutes a metre, at night, for a hundred and one nights, in a building that stopped being his in September, and there is not one person in this room who knows what they are looking at, and I have to stand in front of it and be tried.
Avvocato Pavone opens at seven minutes past twelve.
He is the president of the Fondazione, he is seventy one years old, he has three hundred and nine subscribing members in the chairs behind him, and he does it correctly, which is the worst thing he could have done to me, because I cannot be angry with a man who is being correct.
The certification, he says, is a public act.
The Fondazione is the guardian of a scheduled monument and it is answerable to the city.
Serious questions have been raised. Signora Lindqvist has been invited to answer them and has agreed to do so, and he wishes it minuted that she agreed within one hour of being asked.
Then he says, “Signora.”
And I stand up in front of four hundred people.
And here is the strange thing, and I have thought about it a great deal since, and I do not entirely understand it.
I am not afraid.
I was afraid four years ago. I was twenty nine years old in a dress I did not choose in a room I was not allowed to leave and I was so frightened that I could not feel my own hands, and there was a man at the top table looking at me and I was waiting for him.
I am thirty three and I am in my work boots and I have my own building over my head, and I am not afraid, and I am not waiting for anybody, and if this room takes my licence off me today I will find another way to put my hands on old stone, because that is who my father made.
I stand up in front of four hundred people.
Pavone has put a lectern there and I do not go to it. I take the microphone off the stand and I hold it, because I have been holding things all my life and my hands are no good empty, and I go and stand about a metre in front of the trustees’ table so that the room can see my boots.
“I am going to answer everything,” I say. "I am not going to do it in the order you have been given, because the order you have been given is the whole of the trick, and I am not going to help it along.
"First. I am married to Adrian Kastellanos. We were married nine years ago in London and there was an annulment begun and it was never completed and there is a gap in a file in England, and so I have been that man’s wife every single day that I have been standing in this building with your keys in my pocket.
"I did not disclose it to the Fondazione. Nobody asked me and that is not a defence and I am not offering it as one. It was my duty and I knew it was my duty on the ninth of March and I have known it every day since and I did not do it.
"That is a serious failure. It is not an oversight and it is not a technicality and I am not going to stand in front of you and dress it as one. If you take my licence for it you will be within your rights and I will not appeal.
"Second. I have a daughter. She is four. She is his and she does not know she is his and she did not know his name until August.
"I left England four years ago and I did not tell him she existed and I did not tell his family she existed, and I did that on purpose, for four years, and I want to be extremely clear with this room about something, because there is a journalist against that wall who has already written the sentence in which I weep about it.
“I would do it again.”
The room moves.
I have been in four hundred rooms and I know exactly what that noise is.
It is not outrage. Outrage is loud and it is easy and you can work with it.
That noise is three hundred and nine subscribing members of a foundation shifting one centimetre away from me on their chairs, and it is quiet, and it is the end.
I keep going, because there is nothing else to do with a room once it has done that.
"Third. The fee. Eight hundred and forty thousand euros over twenty two months for a Grade One scheduled monument with four hundred and eleven square metres of terrazzo alla veneziana in it and a hole in the sky.
Your own quantity surveyor has certified it twice.
It is at market and it is under the Vicenza tender by ninety thousand and you have the tenders.
I have not taken one euro from the Kastellanos family in my life other than that fee, and if this board wishes it back, it may have it back today, and I will finish the certification for nothing, because it is nine tenths done and I am not leaving it in the state it is in for somebody else to guess at.
"Fourth. The trust. The twenty ninth of April.
"I did not know about it. I found out about it from a lawyer in July, in a car, and I have never seen the deed and I have never asked to see it and there is four hundred million euros in my daughter’s name that I did not ask for and cannot touch and would put in the sea tomorrow.
"I have no way of proving that to you.
“I want to say that out loud rather than have it said for me. There is no document I can hand this table that proves what I did not know. That is the whole of the shape you were given on Saturday morning and it is a very good shape, and it is built out of true facts, every one of them, and I cannot take a single one of them off you, and I am not going to insult you by trying.”
Somebody’s chair creaks in the seventh row.
“So I am going to tell you what I have got instead.”
I turn round.
I put my hand on the report. It is a hundred and forty two pages and it is in a grey box file with a label on the spine that I wrote myself with a marker at ten o’clock at night because the printer would not do the spine.
"That is the certification.
"There are twenty two months of survey in it.
There are nine hundred photographs. There is a moisture record for the south range that goes back to March and was taken every Monday morning by a woman called Rosa Vanetti, by hand, with a meter she calibrates herself, because I do not trust the loggers.
"The north pier is moving. It is moving four millimetres a year and it has been moving since 1911 and nobody has ever written it down, and it is on page sixty one, and if you do not do something about it in the next decade you will lose the north east corner of this building and everything above it.
"There are nine lines on page one hundred and nine about a repair to the terrazzo border in the north east corner, which was done badly in about 1650 by a man who ran the Greek key backwards for two and a half metres and then noticed, and turned it round, and carried on.
"I have recommended, formally, in a document with my name at the bottom of it, that it is never to be corrected.
"You may take my licence off me this afternoon. You may take the appointment and you may take the fee and you may put it in the minute that you did it, and it is your building and it is your right and I would do the same thing in your chairs.
"But that document is right.
"It is right on the pier and it is right on the render and it is right on the water table and it is right on the border in the corner, and it will still be right in a hundred years when everybody in this room is dead and somebody’s granddaughter opens it in an archive to find out why the north east corner went, and she will find that a woman told you in April, on page sixty one.
“You may do what you like to me. You may not touch that report.”
And I stop.
And I stand in the sala grande of the Cassaro Palazzo with a microphone in my hand and my boots on eighteen millimetre ply, and I look at four hundred faces, and I watch it not work.
That is the only way I can put it. It is not that they think I am lying.
Every single thing I have said in the last twenty six minutes is true, and they know it is true, and it does not matter, because I have given them a moisture record and a note about a pier, and a woman in a grey coat in the fourth row is about to give them a story about a grandmother, and a room will always take the story.
I have spent my whole life believing that if the work is right, the room comes.
I put the microphone back on the stand.
I sit down.
And a woman in the fourth row stands up and asks to be heard.
Nobody stops her. Why would anybody stop her.
She is sixty six years old and she is wearing a grey coat and she has a handbag over her forearm, and she has lost her son and her company and her name, and this is the room’s grandmother, and Avvocato Pavone says, “Signora, of course,” and somebody brings her the microphone off the stand and puts it into her hand.
They bring it to her. Nobody made her walk.
“I am not going to be long,” Eleni Kastellanos says.
She is warm. She has always been warm. That is the part nobody who has not sat opposite her will ever believe.
“I do not know very much about buildings,” she says, and there is a small noise in the room, an affectionate one, and she waits for it, and it costs her nothing.
"I want to say one thing and then I want to sit down and I do not want to answer any questions, because I am sixty six years old and I have not slept since July.