CHAPTER 8
THE APPLICANT
Matias
Seventy-eight, I chalked on the door frame in the grey before the sun came round the hill, because it was the one thing my hands were allowed to do and I had learned to do it first, before the coffee, before anything, so the day would know I meant it.
Seventy-eight days to San Martino. I stood back and looked at the number the way you look at a receipt you are pleased with, and then a car I did not know came up the track — my track, over the neighbour's land, on the handshake between two dead men that everybody kept telling me not to worry about — and it stopped in the yard with the engine still running for a second too long, the driver in it finishing something first.
The man who got out was maybe my age, a little younger, in a shirt that had been ironed at some point that morning and had already given up.
He had a folder under one arm, a laptop bag over the shoulder, and the particular look of a person carrying more than one person's work, which I recognized, because I had spent years being that person, or paying that person, or apologizing to that person, and here he was, at my house, apologizing before he had shaken my hand.
"Dario," he said, and then my name, off the paper, correctly, the way it is supposed to sound. Boccali. He said it clean.
I said it back and put the weight on the wrong syllable, the way I always do, and he was too tired to correct me and too polite to enjoy it, and I liked him for the second thing.
Palla came round the mixer and did not come to me. She went and put her head against Malick's leg — he was already out of the house, wiping his hands on a rag, come to meet the car like weather he had been expecting — and she leaned there, and nobody said anything about it, because nobody ever did.
Dario was warm with him. Warm, and a little afraid of him too. "It's good, the propping," he said, nodding at the house, at the timber castles I had watched go up two days ago from the exact spot a man with a clipboard had put me. "Clean work."
Malick went on wiping his hands and did not look up.
"It holds," he said, to the house and not to the man, and let the compliment lie there — no thanks, nothing given back.
Dario took it and stayed warm anyway — he even nodded, as if something friendly had gone between them, which nothing had — and turned back to me, gently, without complaint, with his folder.
"So," he said. "The file. The file is fine."
I made coffee nobody had asked for. It is what I do.
There was a table, the one dry table, and I put three cups on it and a plate of the biscuits I keep buying that are wrong, that nobody eats and I keep buying anyway, in case this is the week somebody does, and Dario set his laptop down and opened it and it searched for a signal it was never going to find, out here, in this yard, where the phone works only if you walk up to the one spot on the track and stand in view of the road like you are waiting to be arrested.
"No bars," I said.
"No." He almost laughed. "For this — " he tapped the laptop " — the office has a mail nobody reads.
The mail is very modern. And then there is a fax.
The fax works." He said it without irony and that was the whole joke, that a man in a country of frescoes was telling me, in earnest, that the only channel that had ever reached anyone was a machine my father had thrown out in 1994.
"Everything real comes on the fax," he said. "You get used to it, no?"
"I love it," I said, and meant it, because I did.
He apologized for it anyway. He apologized for the fax, and then for the mail nobody read, and then, generally, spreading a hand at the whole valley, for the comune — for the August that eats a month, for the desks that do not answer, for the way a thing that should take a week takes a season and nobody can tell you why or who to shout at, and he apologized the way a man apologizes for his own family at a dinner, half proud of them, and I kept trying to feed him.
Sit, I said, there is more, let me — and he half sat, on the edge of the chair, already late for the next house that needed him, and I recognized that too, and put another biscuit he did not want by his hand.
* * *
The folder came out onto the table between the coffees, and there it was, my house's paper, a stack of it, stamped, initialed, dense, and every single word of it was in a language I did not have.
I turned the top sheet toward me the way you turn a menu you cannot read and are going to order from anyway.
I recognized the shape of it. There was a heading.
There were dates in a column. There was a signature that was not mine and a name that was not mine, and I sat there in my kitchen, in my house, and could not find myself anywhere on the paper for my own front door.
"This is what," I said. "This is the — the permit. For the work."
"For part of the work." Dario turned two pages, found the one he wanted, laid a finger under a line.
"The men inside — the propping, the vault, the consolidation — that is on a different track, it does not need this.
This — " the finger moved " — this is the istanza.
For the roof. The roof is the part that needs it, and it is not here, it is on a desk, in a building down the valley, and it waits. "
"Whose desk?"
He smiled, tired. "Ah."
"When?"
"Ah," he said again, and that was the answer, and I was beginning to learn that in this country the real answer to when was a sound and not a number.
I looked at the name on the istanza. It was not the heirs' either — I mean, it was, Dario said the name on it was the heirs', the Semproni, the people in Buenos Aires who had sold me the house and kept, I would find out, more than the house — but I could not read that, I only knew it was not me.
I, who had paid for this, who had a folder of my own somewhere with my name on every tab, was not the applicant on the one piece of paper that decided whether I would ever have a roof.
"It says the first of May," Dario said, reading. "Filed the first of May."
The first of May. I did the arithmetic without meaning to.
I got here the thirteenth of August. The paper for my house had been filed in May, before I existed to this valley, before I had signed anything, before I had ever pronounced the name of this comune correctly and my own name wrong in the same breath at a counter in a Questura.
In May somebody had filled out the future of my roof.
I did not think anything about that. I want to be honest about it, because I have gone over it since.
I thought: what a place. I thought: what people, that a thing gets started before the owner even lands, that the machine is already turning for you, quietly, out of some old courtesy, the way the lorry of lime comes up the track that is not mine and nobody sends a bill.
I thought it was kindness. I have spent my whole life signing things I did not read — leases, closings, a pen handed across a desk, sign here, and here, and initial there, my mother pressing my hand onto the line, trust the man, he is a friend of a friend — and it had never once cost me a cent, and I had no reason, sitting there with a coffee going cold in my own kitchen, to think this would be the first time.
I looked up, and Malick was in the doorway with the light behind him, and I did the only thing I could think of to understand my own house. I asked the man I had outbid to read it to me.
* * *
He came in. He put a flat hand on the table first, the way he put a flat hand on everything before he had anything to do with it, and then he took the top sheet and held it up to the light from the door and read it.
He read it for maybe ten seconds. Eleven.
His eyes went down the page once, not twice, and I did not understand at the time why it went so fast, why a page that had been Chinese to me for five minutes was nothing to him, eleven seconds, done — I put it down to him being from here, to the words being his, to a competence I was paying for and glad to pay for.
His hands were the reason I could not read them faster than I did, the backs of them cracked white and burned old, the nails cut down to nothing and grey underneath in a way that would not wash.
He held my paper in those hands and gave it back to me without a mark on his face.
"It is the roof," he said. "This paper is only the roof. The men are inside because inside does not need it. The roof needs it. It is at the Soprintendenza. It sits there."
"For how long?"
"Until they look at it."
"And when do they — "
He did not answer that one. He was not being unkind. He was simply not going to invent a number for me, and I mistook the not-inventing for shyness, for a workingman not wanting to promise a rich foreigner a date, when in fact it was the most honest thing anyone said to me all summer.
"Who filed it?" I asked. "It says a name that isn't mine."
"The name on it is the heirs'."
"But they're in Argentina. They've never — they don't even — " I turned the sheet over, as if the back would hold the sense the front withheld. "Somebody wrote this. Somebody sat down and wrote all this out, in May, in — this isn't a thing that fills itself in, no? Somebody wrote it."
"I did," he said.
Two words, flat, no weight on them, no pause after, the way you'd say I locked it or I turned the water off, and he was already looking past me at the wall through the door, at the propped vault, at the day's work waiting.
I want you to understand what I heard. I heard a good neighbour telling me he had done a competent, generous, boring thing — filled out a form for a house that needed the form filled out, months ago, because it needed doing and he was the one who knew how.
I heard exactly what a decent man sounds like.
He had written the paper for my house in May, in his own hand, in the heirs' name, and handed it across a desk to the same machine that was now going to keep it, and he told me this plainly, a fact about my own roof, and I said, well, thank God somebody knew how, and I poured him a coffee he did not touch.
"Why?" I said.
And he answered with the wall. "The roof has to be off that desk before the frost is on the hill," he said, "or you lose the year.
Not a week. The year. The lime does not cure cold.
You get the roof cured and dry before the first freeze or you wait for spring, and spring is a long way, and the wall is under the sky the whole time.
" He said it looking at the timber, and it was true, every word of it was true, and it was not the answer to the question I had asked, and I took it as the answer to the question I had asked, because it was the only kind of answer he gave and I had not yet learned to hear the space underneath one.
So I did the thing I do. I reached for the currency I had.
"Okay," I said. "So we move it. Whatever it takes — more people on it, somebody who knows somebody at the — I'll pay to move it up the desk, I'll pay for a second man to sit on it, whatever the — " I was already halfway into my pocket for a phone that had no bars.
"There's always a way to make a thing go faster. "
Dario looked at his cold coffee. Malick looked at the wall.
Neither of them said the thing, and they did not say it because they were both, in their different ways, too kind to watch me learn it out loud in my own kitchen.
Dario just said, "It doesn't work like that, exactly," warmly, and let it go, and I felt the first cold thread of being a guest in my own paperwork and covered it by offering to buy more of it, which is what I do.
Let me at least pay you for the trip up, I said, the petrol, the morning, you came all this way — and he waved it off, the trip was nothing, the trip was his job, and I heard my own voice pushing a folded thing across a table that did not want it, and I could not stop, because a thing you have paid for is a thing you have put down, and I did not want to be carrying any of this, and I did not yet know that some of it does not go in a pocket.
Dario turned the last pages, squaring them, and stopped once, near the bottom, on a sheet he read a half-second longer than the others. Something crossed his face and went. Then he closed the folder.
"It's fine," he said. "The file is fine." And then, gathering his dead laptop, glancing out the door at the hill going gold, at the olives, at the propped dark shape of my house: "You'll want the roof on before the weather turns. It comes early up here, some years."
Malick looked at the wall a moment and agreed it was a good day for it.