CHAPTER 5
THE MAESTRO'S BOX
Malick
Before light I had the bottega open and the cold came out to meet me the way it does — off the floor, off the banker, off the iron of the stove that had not been lit since spring.
The banker sits where it sits, waist height, in the middle of the floor, and it is the most-used thing in the building.
Everything a man makes, he makes on a stone at that height.
Everything else stands against a wall and waits its turn.
I have stood at that block since before the boy in the photograph on the door of the office was the boy in the photograph, and my knees know the height of it now the way they know the height of the north wall's springing, which is to say they complain about both and go anyway.
Trowels on the rack, and I use one. It is older than Ibu.
The lime has eaten it thin at the heel and taken the edge down to something soft and true, and my hand finds it in the dark before my eye does.
The rest I keep because you keep them. A trowel is a season of your hand. You do not throw a season out.
Floats after that — wood, sponge, felt — and which one is a decision I make before I have finished deciding to make it.
Sand in its grades, each grade in its own heap, never crossed.
Crushed fired tile screened into the bins, and it comes up pink, always the small surprise of it, pink as a cut.
Pigment in the jars the colour of this hill, because it is this hill; a man does not import his earth.
The mallet by the roll is wood, not steel, and it will be wood as long as it is my hand on it.
Steel on a chisel rings and jars and takes the arris off a stone in a way you cannot put back; wood says the same thing quieter and the stone keeps its edge.
The place smells of cold ash from the dead stove, and of the oil I keep the steel in, and of stone that has been damp so long it has forgotten how to be dry.
That smell is the smell of the whole trade to me and I would not know how to sleep without some version of it in the room.
The grinder in the corner, because a restorer dresses his own chisels or he has no business with an edge.
My maestro says that. He says it in the present tense, in my head, at the bench, most mornings, and he has been in the ground some winters now, and I say it for him because there is nobody else left in this valley to say it.
He says other things too — that lime is a slow argument you win by not raising your voice, that a man who loves cement is a man in a hurry to be gone — and I have never once caught myself deciding whether I agree; the opinions came to me the way the height of the banker came to me, from standing where he stood.
His box sits on the shelf above the banker, his name on the lid in his own hand where he wrote it, and nobody has ever painted it out.
My name is on nothing in this room. There is work to do.
I keep the folder dry on the high shelf, wrapped in oilcloth against the damp that comes up through this floor every autumn no matter what I put down.
Certificates in it. Photographs of walls with a scale bar laid in them, each one dated, each one countersigned, because a wall does not remember out loud and the paper does.
I put the reading glasses on for the small print of a certificate, because the print on a certificate is made small on purpose by men who do not have to read it.
And I take the glasses off when I hear the scooter come up the track, because the scooter is Ibu, and there are things a boy does not need to catch his uncle needing.
* * *
The scooter died in the yard and the door came open and we were already at it, the two of us, before he was over the sill.
He went for the claw chisel. They all go for the fine tool first. It is the one that looks like it does the work.
It does the least. He set it to the face of a stone I had brought in to make good and went at it like it owed him money, and I took it out of his hand and rolled it back into the roll and gave him the wide one, and I said nothing, and he rolled his eyes where he thought I could not see, and I could.
He held the wide one the wrong way round.
I turned it in his fingers a quarter and let go, and he swore softly in the dialect of this valley, which is the only tongue he has, and got on.
He is eighteen and he does not want any of this. He wants to be somewhere the buses run at night. This is a slow trade for a fast boy, and the day I make my peace with him going is a day I would rather buy on credit and pay for later.
"You know they have machines for this," he said, to the stone, not to me.
He says it about once a week, and he is right about that too, there are machines, and the machines are why half the walls in this province are coming off in sheets.
"There's a man online, he does a whole facade in an afternoon. Sprayer. In and out."
"And in five years," I said, "somebody pays a man like me to take the man online's afternoon back off with a poultice, one hand's width at a time, over a winter."
"So it's good for you." He grinned at the stone. He thinks I am a nineteenth-century man, and he says so, and he is not wrong about that either; I am the century he thinks I am, and I have made no case to him for it. My maestro left the door open for me and never said a word.
The comune's side wanted a paper for him.
A player's paper, for the team, with a stamp and a box on it, and the box wanted a date that should have been set down years back by a grown person who did not set it down.
Nobody's spite. I sat at the banker and I filled it in, in the block letters the office likes, and I signed where the paper wants a witness to sign, and I put the date on it that today's date is.
"Is it a problem," Ibu said. He did not look up from the stone.
"It's a form," I said.
He nodded and blew tile dust off the face he was ruining and went back to ruining it, and that was the whole of it, and I let it be the whole of it, and I put the paper flat in the folder under the oilcloth where the damp does not reach.
Then I took the wide chisel off him again, because he had drifted his angle without knowing, and I set his wrist where the wrist goes, and held it there a breath, and let him have it back.
* * *
Later, up at the house. The crew were inside it.
All of them, indoors, in the middle of August, with the hill baking outside and the men in the cool under the volta doing slow careful work to the standing walls, and nobody had thought to tell Mattia why the men he understood to be mending his roof were all of them in his front room.
The roof was somewhere else. Half of it was still on over the east range, the old flat tiles holding as they have held, and the other half was a temporary sheet and a square of sky, and the sound of the crew came down out of the dark of the vault the way water comes down a wall, from everywhere and from no place you can point at.
On the door frame the chalk said eighty-four in Mattia's hand. He does the days. I have never once counted this in days; I count it in what will have set by the time the cold comes.
I went in among them for a while, into the cool under the vault where the men were at the walls, raking out a joint here, cutting back a bad old repair there, the careful indoor work that is the reason they are indoors and that nobody had thought to say to the American in words he owns.
The vault holds over their heads, cracked along its crown the way it has been cracked longer than any man here has been alive, and the light comes in sideways under the gone half of the roof and stands in the dust and does not reach the far corners.
I put a flat hand to the north stones from the inside, where they are cold even now, and read what a hand reads, and said nothing to anybody, and came out again into the heat blinking like a man out of a cinema.
The lorry came up the track in the middle of the morning, lime on the bed of it, across the field that everyone in this comune calls Valerio's, and it is a courtesy that it comes that way and the whole comune treats the courtesy as weather.
Mattia waved at it with his entire arm, both hands nearly, the way he waves at everything, as if a lorry could be pleased to be seen.
The driver knows Palla by four names that are not her name and leaned out and used two of them.
She had ridden up in the van with me and gone to my leg the second her feet touched the yard, and she left it now to go and be lied to by a man with crusts, which is the extent of her loyalty and I have made my peace with it.
The American had coffee for everyone. He always has coffee for everyone, and water, and by ten a plate of something out of a bag, and he carries it around the edge of the site to men who cannot stop to take it, and he cannot see that a man on a wall does not want a cup in his one free hand, and he does it anyway, and there is no unkindness anywhere in it.
He carried the tray to the line the crew had strung and stood at the edge of the perimeter where he is kept, holding it out over the rope, offering coffee across a boundary he did not know was there, to men whose paperwork was the only reason he stood on the outside of a rope in his own field.
The foreman took a cup to be decent. The rest waved him off, kindly, the way you wave off weather.
He does not know that everything on this site orbits the house and the light and not him.
He thinks a site is a thing you host. He set his tray on a stack of tiles and asked me if the men had eaten, and whether I had eaten, and I told him seasons do not eat, which was meant as nothing and which he decided was a joke and laughed at, and I let him keep it.
I went out past the yard to the pit on the common to look at the lime in it.
Ibu came because there was food in the day for him at the end of it, not because he wanted to look at lime.
I lifted the plank off and the water stood on the putty a hand deep, still, unbroken, no skin torn on it, and it was right.
I told the boy again what the water is, because he forgets it on purpose to make me say it.
The water is not there to keep it. The water is the lid.
You flood the putty and you leave it and the air cannot get down through the water to the lime, and it sits under there in the dark getting fatter and slower and kinder, and the more time it takes the less it will want to crack on you later, on a wall, in a frost, in front of everyone; and you do not hurry it, and you cannot hurry it, and a man who tries to hurry lime has told you everything about himself he was hoping to keep to himself, and the wall he builds will tell it again to the next man who comes along in fifty years and reads it.
I stood there with the plank in my two hands and said all of that to a boy who was already looking at his phone.
And fifteen feet off, up where the ground rises to the yard, Mattia had stopped.
He had come out to carry the driver a coffee and he had not carried it; he was standing with the cup going cold in his hand and his head a little to one side, listening to a man talk to a boy about water.
I did not stop, and I do not know why I did not, and I put the plank back down.
Then he came down the slope, careful of the loose ground the way a man is careful of ground he does not trust, and he stood over the pit and looked into the hole in it.
"What's this," he said.
"Lime," I said.
He went down on his heels beside it. He looked at the grey of it under the still water as though it might do something while he watched. "How long's it been down there," he said.
"Long enough," I said.
He waited for the number. He waits for numbers the way he chalks them, with his hand half open, ready to catch one. I gave him the two words and turned back to the plank.
"That's not an answer," he said, still on his heels, still looking down into it, smiling now, because he had decided to be charmed rather than to be told nothing, which is a thing he does, which is a kind of manners and a kind of armour and I had not yet worked out the seam between the two.
"That's a man telling me to mind my business in a nice voice. "
"It's down until it's ready," I said. "Nobody put a calendar in the ground."
"See, that's worse." He laughed — at me, not unkindly — and said something about how I was the most expensive man in the province to get a straight answer out of, and he reached over and set the plank back himself, crooked, proud of it, and I let him have that, and I put it true when he had gone back up the slope to find the coffee he had promised a driver and forgotten.
He had walked past that pit every day since he came and never once seen it. Today he saw a hole in the ground, and I let him.