CHAPTER 2
EIGHTY-NINE
Matias
The first thing that happened to me in that house happened in the dark, and it was, if you want the truth of it, a joke — I just didn't have the Italian yet to know it was one, and I'd tell it now the way you tell a good one, straight, and let you get there before me.
I came up a track I couldn't see the end of, in a rental that cost me forty euros a day and smelled of somebody else's cigarettes, and when the headlights swung across the yard there was a man standing in it with a pencil in his hand, calm as a fence post, like he'd been out there waiting for weather and I was the weather that came.
He had a key. It was my yard — I had the folder on the passenger seat that said in two languages it was my yard — and he had a key to the house on it, and none of this seemed to land on him as a thing that wanted explaining, and by the time I'd worked out how you even start to ask a stranger why he can let himself into a place you signed for that same afternoon, he'd said one word that turned out to be Monday and walked off down the track on foot, into the dark, and the old dog asleep by the door hadn't so much as opened an eye.
So that was the welcome. In the morning the folder was still sitting on the one dry table in the place, and I stood over the deed in the good light and could not read a word of it but three: my own name, which they'd spelled right; the name of the village; and the number that was the price, which I could have read in any language on the planet, drunk, half asleep, because a price is the one sentence I have never in my life needed translated.
I'd bought the whole thing off a photograph and a video call and a man in Buenos Aires who laughed a lot.
I hadn't asked a single question. I remember being proud of that — of how clean it had been, how easy, sign here and it's yours, no survey, no lawyer of my own, no what-about-the-roof — I remember thinking that ease was a kind of talent I had, the way some people can whistle.
The word I did understand, out of the whole night, was Monday, and I'd decided it meant the man was coming back to work, and that men were coming, and that by the following week there would be the good noise of a house being put right, and I'd have to feed them, and I was already planning that — already, before I'd found the water, laying a long table in the yard in my head, olives on it, everyone I hadn't met yet sitting down to something I'd made — because that is the direction my mind falls the second it has a floor under it.
Not what will this cost me. Who am I hosting, and when.
By nine there were people in the yard. That is not a figure of speech; there were people, coming up my un-drivable track on foot and on one scooter, bringing things — a woman with a jar of something, a man with a strimmer he clearly wasn't going to use, two more behind him with their hands in their pockets, all of them looking at me the frank sunny way you look at a new animal at the fair.
I did what I do. I offered them coffee I didn't have, in a kitchen with no gas, and they laughed, and I laughed with them, and somebody produced a thermos from somewhere and it became my coffee that I was hosting, which was better, honestly, than if I'd had my own.
The woman with the jar asked me my name.
I gave her the whole of it, first and last, the way it's printed on everything I own, and I said the last part the way my father said it — and she stopped, and her whole face lit up like I'd done a small brave trick, and she said it back to me, corrected, the vowels sitting somewhere I could not get my mouth to go.
I tried again. Worse. The man with the strimmer put it down to help.
Then the two behind him helped, over the top of each other, and then a fourth one who'd arrived, and they were all saying my own name to me, my father's name, the name on the deed, delightedly, patiently, three and four times, moving my last name around in the air with their hands like it was a stone that needed setting, and not one of them could get me to land it and not one of them stopped enjoying that I couldn't.
"Mattia," the woman said finally, giving up on the surname, handing me the first name instead, softened. "Mattia."
I laughed first. I always laugh first, before anyone can beat me to it, it is the cheapest insurance there is and I have never once regretted the premium. Somebody found a marker and wrote MATTIA on the lid of the jar she'd brought, so I'd know it was mine, and set it on the windowsill in the sun.
* * *
The man with the strimmer — Dario, it turned out, though half of them called him something else — was the one who said San Martino.
He said it the way you'd say a person's name, warm, certain I'd know it, and when it was plain from my face that I didn't he told me: a day in November, the new oil, the new wine, fires on the hills, the whole village in the street, and something about moving — I didn't catch the something about moving, my ear filled in a party and let the rest go by.
I liked the sound of it enormously. I asked how far off it was.
Somebody counted on their fingers and gave me a date, and I did the arithmetic out loud, in English, in front of everyone, because that is how I think — the mouth first and the sense a half-step behind it — and I came up with a number, and it was a number, and my hands wanted something to do that the men in my yard were plainly not going to let them do, and so I found a nub of chalk in my pocket from I don't know where and I wrote it on the door frame, big, in digits.
89.
No ceremony to it. Nobody asked me to. It was a thing to do with a hand, and mine had been standing around all morning like a guest who'd arrived too early, and now it had made a mark, and the mark said how long I got.
They liked the chalk. They liked it the way you like a child's drawing, which I did not mind, and while they were liking it I went and dragged my one real suitcase out to the step and opened it in the sun, and that was where the day tipped over into something I'll keep.
I took out the gourd and the bombilla.
They are the only things I brought that were mine — mine mine, from before, not bought for the house or the visa or the man in Buenos Aires.
The gourd went dark at the rim years ago from my mouth and my father's before him, and it had sat on a kitchen table in New Jersey my whole life and nobody there had ever once thought it was strange.
I set it on the step and started the water, and the whole yard came in close to look, six heads over one small thing, and a woman reached out and — before I could get a hand up — took the bombilla and gave it a good social stir, the way you'd stir a coffee, to be polite, to join in.
The noise I made. I have heard it described since.
It was the noise of a man taking a low blow, and it stopped every conversation in the yard, and then it started a much louder one, all of them delighted and appalled at once, and me trying to explain with my hands, no, no, you don't — and I didn't explain, I refused on principle to explain, some things you let a place come to on its own or they never come to it.
I fixed the bombilla and stood guard over it.
I passed the gourd around anyway, refilled between hands, the way you do, the way it's meant to go around, and they took it off me one after another and drank and made faces — sour, betrayed, immensely pleased to have been betrayed — and handed it back and asked for it again, which is the whole trick of the thing and nobody had to tell them.
One woman drank hers and said nothing and held the gourd a second longer than the rest and gave it back and looked at me, and did not make a face, and that one I'd have signed the house over to on the spot.
While all this was going on the dog ate my lunch.
I'd set a plate on the low step and turned my back on it for the length of a stirred bombilla, and when I turned around the fat old thing that had watched me arrive in the dark was working through the last of my bread with the unhurried focus of an animal who has eaten off this step under four different owners and expects to eat off it under four more.
Nobody scolded her. She wasn't anybody's to scold.
She finished, sighed the way she'd sigh in every room I was ever in after that, and lay down against the cool of the north wall as if she'd decided the matter of me and found it acceptable.
* * *
By the middle of the afternoon they'd gone the way village people go, in ones, without leaving, so that the yard was empty and I could still hear them, and the heat had come up hard and flat, and I was alone in a house I owned and could not open a window in without learning something I didn't want to know.
I went looking for the fuse box.
This is a thing I understand about myself: I cannot bear a room I can't turn the lights on in.
I wanted the box found and the switch flicked and the whole place mine on my own terms before dark, and I had it in my head that this would be the first real job I did in the house, the first thing I put my own two hands to and got to call done, and I went at the hunt happily, sweating, narrating it to the empty rooms, certain it was behind the next thing I moved.
I'd been through the front, through the kitchen with the dead stove, into the long cold back part where the floor was two hundred years of somebody's leaves and the smell was mouse gone dry and plaster gone cold and the particular closed-up green of a house shut since before I was a person.
Dust hung in the one bar of light coming through the sheet where the roof wasn't. Half the roof was still on, old flat tiles I could see the underside of; the other half was that sheet, and open sky.
I stood in the middle of it talking to myself, which I do, out loud, to the house, to the dog who wasn't there, to my father, to nobody — because silence in a room is a hole and I am built to the exact shape of a man who fills holes — and I said, out loud, well, and I looked up.
The ceiling was cracked.
Right up the middle of the curve of it, the whole span, a long dark line in the white, and I stood there under it with my neck bent back and thought, in those words, the ceiling is cracked, and felt I'd found something out, and made a note to tell somebody, and did not think about it again for a while.
There was a fuse box to find. A cracked ceiling is a thing you get to later, after the lights.
So I got on with the lights. I went along the walls with the flat of my hand, the way you'd read a wall in the dark, because that is genuinely how I looked for it — feeling for the cool metal of a box, talking the whole time, telling the house it had good bones, telling the dog that wasn't there that we'd have this sorted by dinner, telling my father, who has been dead long enough that I talk to him more than I did at the end, that he should see the size of the kitchen.
The heat sat in that back room like water.
Dust turned over in the torchlight wherever I moved.
And low on the wall, where my hand kept expecting metal and kept not finding it, my fingers went instead across something smooth and flat and cool and not metal at all.
I never did find the box that day. What I found, low down where you'd think a box would be, were the plates.
Little squares of clear plastic, glued flat across the cracks — and every crack in that house had them, once I had my eye in, on the good walls and the bad ones, low and high, some the size of a stamp and some longer.
And on the plaster beside each one, in pencil, in one man's small square hand, were dates.
Rows of them. A date and a little number, a date and a little number, down the wall, some of them faded almost into the plaster and some fresh enough to smudge under a thumb, going back — I crouched and held the torch close and read them the way you read a foreign menu, by the parts you can read — going back years.
The oldest I found said 2022, and under it a stack of others, patient, in the same hand, the newest of them a date that was only this week.
I could not read one word of that house.
Not the deed, not the party, not my own name in their mouths.
But a date is not a language, and a number is a number in the dark, and I crouched there and read every single one of them off the walls of the place I'd bought, all that careful pencil, all those years of somebody coming back to look at the same cracks and write down what they'd done since the last time — and it told me nothing at all, except that someone had been keeping an eye on the house long before it was ever mine, and had never once mentioned it to a soul.
It was nice of somebody, I thought, and went back to looking for the fuse box.