Chapter Fifty-Three #2
"There was a woman in my chair.
"There was a man in a suit who put a folder on the linen next to me the way a waiter offers bread, and somebody in that building was paid, before the doors opened, before you had shaken one hand, to take a piece of cream cardstock with my name on it out of a slot and put it in a bin, and that is the thing I cannot get out of my body, and I have tried, and there is a woman in Turin who has been paid a great deal of money by me to try, and it is still there.
"I was three weeks pregnant.
“I was going to tell you in the car.”
He puts his hand over his mouth.
“Take it down,” I say.
He takes it down.
“I have watched you do that for nine years,” I say. "That is you grading yourself. That is the mark going in a book that nobody else is allowed to read, and then you carry it around, and it is yours, and it is private, and you have never once shown me the book.
"You did it in the ballroom.
“I looked at you across four hundred people and you were the colour of paper and your jaw was locked and you knew exactly what I was asking you and you knew you were not going to give it to me, and you put your hand over your mouth in that room like a man watching something on a screen.”
“Yes,” he says.
“Do not agree with me.”
“I am not agreeing with you,” he says. “I am telling you it is true.”
“That is agreeing with me. That is the most expensive thing you have ever learned to do and I want you to stop doing it. You have been sitting there for four months with your hands behind your back taking everything anybody puts on you like a man at a border, and it is beautiful, and it costs you nothing, and it costs me everything, because there is nowhere in it for me to put this.”
And I am standing up. I do not know when I stood up.
“I was on a plane at five forty in the morning,” I say. "I had a chisel scar and a passport and three hundred euros. I had a child in me that nobody on this earth knew about and I was sick in a lavatory over the Alps with a folder in my hand that said the marriage never happened.
"I gave birth in Turin on the fourteenth of July at twenty past four in the morning and there was nobody in the corridor.
"Nobody, Adrian. My father was on the water.
Ines did not exist yet. There was a woman called Kari who was a midwife and who I have never seen since and who held my hand for six hours because it was her job, and at four in the morning she asked me whether there was somebody she could telephone, and I said no.
"She had croup at nine months and I sat on the floor of a bathroom in Milan with the hot tap running for three hours at a time, five nights running, on my own, and I would have given every year of my life to have had one other adult person standing in that door.
"And you were at a table in Rotterdam.
“That is not a cruelty. That is where you were. I have looked it up. I did it deliberately one night when she was two, and I found out where you had been on the worst night of my life, and I sat at a kitchen table and I looked at a photograph of you in a suit at a dinner and I hated you so much that I had to go outside and stand in the street.”
He does not move. He does not look away. He takes it standing up with his hands at his sides, sitting down, and it is the same thing.
“And now you have done all this,” I say.
“Nora.”
"You have burned a company and a fleet and your name and both your hands and you stood up in my building and you gave them everything, and you have never once come to me and said sorry, and I have worked out why, and it is the cleverest thing you have ever done and I do not think you even know you did it.
"Because if you say it, I have to do something with it.
"If you say sorry to my face in a room I have to either take it or refuse it, and both of those things put me on the scale, and you have decided, on my behalf, without asking me, that I am never going to be on a scale again.
"You have made yourself unrefusable.
“You have arranged it so that there is nothing I can throw at you that you have not already thrown at yourself harder, in public, with the press against the wall, and so I have been carrying this thing for four years and I have nowhere to put it down, and I would like to put it down, and you have taken the floor away.”
And I stop.
The yard is completely still. There is chalk on the flagstones and a wall drawn on it with the window on the wrong side, and a fallen wall my daughter drew on purpose so that a man could see it.
Adrian Kastellanos stands up.
He does not come towards me. He stands on a step in a courtyard in Milan with a hat in his hand and he looks at me, and he does not put his hands behind his back, and I see him decide not to, and it takes him a moment.
“I am sorry,” he says.
“Say what for.”