Chapter Fifty-Three
He is at the corner at twenty to six on the following Thursday and there are nine photographers on Via Cassaro, and he stands on that pavement for twenty minutes and lets them take every frame they want, because he is not going to arrive at my gate at a run.
The Ordine closed the file on the Tuesday. Two lines. They found a failure to disclose and they issued a written censure and they did not suspend, and Ines rang me from a car and could not speak for six seconds.
The English application was withdrawn on the Wednesday.
It never went near a court. Gideon Farrell filed the trust deed and the dates and the instruction to himself from April, the one that says he is to resign if I am ever telephoned about a schedule, and an English solicitor who has never met me read it and wrote to Eleni Kastellanos and told her, in the way those men do, that the application was without merit and that he would not be pursuing it.
She has not answered him.
The Fondazione accepted the certification on the Monday morning by seven votes to nil, with Avvocato Pavone recording, in the minute, at his own insistence, that the report is the finest piece of conservation work he has read in thirty years and that the trustees regret the manner in which it was received.
He telephoned me himself to read me the minute. He is seventy one years old and he apologised to me on the telephone for six minutes and I let him do all of it.
I have my licence. I have my building. I have a hundred and forty two pages with my name at the bottom and a Greek key border under the north wall that will be in a book one day.
And I have not spoken to Adrian Kastellanos since he said three words to me in a room full of four hundred people and gave a box of paper to a lawyer and walked out of it.
He comes through the gate at six o’clock exactly.
He signs the book. He takes a hat off the peg and puts it on before the line.
He walks across the yard with nothing in his hands, and he has a censure, and a criminal referral, and no company, and no name, and no house, and two fingernails that are never coming back, and he sits down on the step of the loggia with a piece of site chalk and draws a section through a wall for a four year old who does not know who he is.
She has an entire cornice to show him. She has been working on it since Sunday on the kitchen floor in Milan on the back of eleven sheets of my drawings, and it is dreadful, and he looks at it for a long time.
“The wall has fallen over,” Sophia says, before he can.
“It has.”
“I know. I did it on purpose so you could see.”
“That,” Adrian says, “is the worst lie I have ever heard in my life, and I have been lied to by professionals.”
And my daughter laughs. Out loud. In a yard. At a man who has told her she is a liar.
I stand in the doorway of the gatehouse with my hand on the frame and I do not move.
At seven o’clock he stands up.
“That is the hour,” he says.
She goes. There is no scene. She has decided, at some point in the last thirteen weeks, that seven o’clock is simply a fact about the world, like rain, and she takes my hand and she does not look back at him, and I take her out to the gate and Giulia is there, and I put my child into that woman’s care in the street and I watch her go up Via Cassaro on the low wall by the church with her hand in Giulia’s hand.
And then I turn round and I go back through the gate of my own building.
He is sitting on the steps of the loggia.
Not the step he draws on. The wide ones, the four shallow ones that come down into the yard, that are 1604 and worn in the middle like soap.
He has taken the hat off and he is holding it in both hands between his knees, and he is looking at the flagstones where the chalk is, and he has not signed himself out, and the light has gone very low and orange over the top of the west range.
He does not hear me. That is how tired he is.
I sit down next to him on the steps.
I have not been within six feet of that man for thirteen weeks. I have not been within six feet of him without a rule between us in four years.
He does not move. He does not turn his head.
“You did not sign out,” I say.
“No.”
“That is a site rule.”
“Yes.”
“It is the first one you have broken.”
“Yes,” Adrian says.
The building ticks over our heads. There is a compressor going somewhere behind the church and there is a bell doing the quarter hour and the whole of the Cassaro is letting the day go, out of the stone, the way it does, and I have sat on these steps four hundred times in my life.
“Where are you living,” I say.
He looks at his hat.
“You are not allowed to ask me that,” he says. “You wrote it in the book. I am not permitted to ask you a single question about yourself and you are not permitted to ask me one. You may talk to me about a wall.”
“I wrote that.”
“You did.”
“I am amending the method statement,” I say.
And that is when he turns his head.
Four years. A ballroom in London and a corridor in Milan and a ceiling coming down on my back and a recording in a car park in Rivoli and a floor and an hour and a room with four hundred people in it, and Adrian Kastellanos turns his head on a step in a courtyard and looks at me, and there is nothing on his face at all, because he will not let there be, because he has spent four months teaching himself not to want anything in front of me.
“Nora,” he says. “Do not.”
“Do not what.”
“Do not do this because of a room,” he says, and his voice is not steady and he does not try to make it steady.
"I did not do that for you. I have told you that and I meant it and I am telling you again on a step.
If you come to me now it is because I stood up in a hall and gave a box to a lawyer, and in twenty years, when it is going badly, when it is a Tuesday and there is nothing in the house and you are tired of me, that room will be sitting in the corner of it and I will not be able to get it out, and neither will you.
“I have been the man on the winning side of a scale,” he says. "I know exactly what it does. I put a woman on one and I have spent four years underneath it.
“So do not do it because of a room.”
And I sit on the steps of the Cassaro Palazzo next to my husband and I look at the yard, and the chalk, and the fallen wall my daughter drew on purpose.
“It is not the room,” I say.
“Nora.”
"Adrian, look at me. It is not the room. I want you to hear this properly because I am only going to say it once and then I am never going to explain myself to you again about anything as long as I live.
"When you stood up in there I was not saved.
I want you to know that. I was not going to lose.
I had my hands on that lectern and I was ready and I would have gone down swinging in front of four hundred people and I would have got back up, because that is what I am, and I do not need a man to stand up for me and I never did.
“That is not what happened to me in that room.”
I put my hands flat on the stone on either side of me, because it is the only way I know how to hold the ground.
“What happened to me in that room,” I say, "is that I looked at you across four hundred people. And you looked back at me.
“And you did not say nothing.”
The bell finishes. The yard is completely still.
“That is all it was,” I say. “That is the whole of it. Half a second. It has taken you four years and a company and a fleet and both your hands to buy half a second, and I would like you to understand that I would have taken it four years ago for free.”
And then I do not stand up, and I do not touch him, and I sit on a step in my own courtyard with my hands flat on the stone, and something comes up through me that has been under the floor of my life for four years.
“Sit down,” I say.
“I am sitting down.”
“Then stay there,” I say, “because I have not finished, and you are going to hear the rest of it, and you are not going to say one word until I am done.”
He goes very still.
“You have talked to a room in Perama,” I say.
"You have talked to a room in Stratford for six hours.
You talked to four hundred people in my building last Thursday for nine minutes with your hands at your sides and you gave them the note and the date and the nine words and the accounts, and there were thirty one journalists standing against the west wall, and you gave the whole of it to strangers.
“You have never once said any of it to me.”
He starts to speak.
“No,” I say. “Sit there.”
The light has gone off the top of the west range. There is a bell somewhere behind the church and it does the quarter and neither of us hears it.
“The ninth of November,” I say. "You are going to sit on this step and you are going to do it with me, now, out loud, and you are not going to be allowed to do it well.
"I was standing beside you.
"Your hand was on my back. Do you know where.
Because I do. It was flat, and it was under my left shoulder blade, and I have not been able to have anybody put a hand there since, and Ines does not know why and my own father does not know why, and I found out three years ago in a shop in Milan when a woman put her hand there to move me out of the way of a door.
"And it came off.
"It did not come off fast. It did not snatch. It stopped being there, the way a light stops being there, and I stood in a room in a dress that was not mine and I felt the cold on that exact piece of skin and I thought, oh.
“Say it.”
“Nora.”
“Say what you did with your hand.”
And Adrian Kastellanos, on a step, in a courtyard, with a hat in his hands, says: “I took my hand off your back.”
“And then.”
“And then I did not move.”
“For how long.”
“Three minutes and forty seconds,” he says. “It is the length of the recording. I have it.”
“Do not give me the number.” My voice does something and I let it. "I am not asking you for the arithmetic. I have had four years of your arithmetic and it is in every room of my life and I would like you to know that I have never once been comforted by a single figure of it.