CHAPTER 9
LEAVE IT
Malick
I came up before the sun because a joint you point in the afternoon has gone off by morning, and it wants the iron one more time while the lime is still soft enough to take it.
That is the trouble with the heat. You are always a morning behind your own hands.
The van stays where the van stays, down at the turn, so I went up on foot with the hill still dark and the birds not started, and the stone on the north side holding the cold it holds on that face until Christmas.
Palla came off the step and put her head against my leg before I had the gate open. Then she went ahead of me, on business of her own.
I had left two courses raked out the evening before, waiting. I went round the back, where the wall runs long and out of the men's way, and I put a flat hand on it to feel where the damp still sat in the bed, because that is how you learn what an hour will do to it.
The joint was full.
Two metres of it. Pointed, struck, finished. A tight grey ribbon run along every course, tooled smooth, the edges clean, done with a patience you could see from where I stood. Done well. Whoever laid it had taken his time and had wanted it right, and it was a beautiful thing.
It was cement.
Mattia was at the end of the run with a bucket at his feet and a pointing iron in his hand he had got from somewhere.
Grey to the elbow. His face burnt across the top of it, from a day I had not watched him have.
He had started in the night. I did not have to ask when.
He had the dark, and he had spent it here, on his knees, against this wall, of all the walls on this hill, with a bag of the wrong thing.
I could read the night off the ground the way you read a wall.
The bag opened with a knife, not torn. Water carried up from the standpipe in the dark, more than one trip, because the mix was near right and you do not get the mix right on one guess.
He had begun at the far end, where the work is low and easy, and you could see the hand find its rhythm as it came toward me, the joints getting truer, the last stretch nearly good — and then the cold had got into him and the line wandered, and that was where he had stopped, near six, with the birds starting.
He had taught himself to point a wall in a night, off nobody, because he wanted to. In cement.
He was looking at me the way a man looks who has made something. I had not seen that on him before. Three weeks of a house he owned and could not touch, and he had found two metres of wall nobody was standing on, and he had gone and touched it, and now he was standing next to it, waiting.
I put my hand flat on the cement.
It gives you nothing back. Lime is warm even when it is cold; it breathes; you feel it wanting to move under the heel of your hand.
Cement is a shut door. It sat there hard and even and dead, keeping the water in the stone instead of letting the wall sweat it out, and in ten winters the stone behind it would blow to sand and the cement would still be there, whole, proud, holding the ruin together like a splint on a bone that has already gone.
I said, "We'll take it off."
Two words of it he would have, out of the four, and the fourth he took from my face. He did not understand yet what it cost. He heard the quiet before I spoke it and read that as the other thing, the good thing, a man impressed. I let him. I was not going to be the one to teach him what a week was.
Because that is what it was. A week. You lay a metre of good joint in a day when the wall is honest and lets you. You do not take a metre of cement off in a day. You take it off in a day and a half, careful, if you want to keep the stone, and you do not always keep the stone.
I got the chisel and the wooden mallet from the bag by the door. Not the steel. Steel would have been faster and steel would have finished the job the cement started.
Here is the thing nobody tells the man who reaches for the cement because it is strong.
It is stronger than the stone. So when you go in with the chisel to clear it out, the cement holds, and the stone lets go, and what comes away in the tool is the face of the stone, a little at a time, a pale scar under every bite where four hundred years of weather-skin used to be.
You are not undoing the mistake. There is no undoing it.
You are only choosing, bite by bite, which of two damages you would rather keep for good.
I chose. I set the chisel at the shallowest angle the joint would take and I worked along the bed, and the note changed as I went — a dead flat knock in the cement, dusty, no music in it, and then the higher clean ring the second the edge found true stone under it, and I would stop there, every time, on the ring, and move the tool along.
Knock, knock, ring. Stop. Knock, ring. Stop.
It is not fast and it is not meant to be.
The two do not even smell the same. Cement dust is cold in the nose, flat, the smell of the inside of a bag, nothing living in it.
Where the chisel reached the old bedding under it the lime came up sweet and open, the smell of a thing still working, still breathing out the fire it was burned with a lifetime before I got there.
You learn to trust the sweet one and to keep an eye on the other, and nobody has to tell you twice.
The first stone spalled. A chip the size of a thumbnail flew off pale and lay in the dust with the old grey face on one side and the raw new break on the other, and I heard Mattia hear it.
He did not know what he had heard. He knew it was a sound the wall had not made before and that I had not flinched at it, and he stood there working out whether it was a good sound, and there was nobody in the yard to tell him it was not.
I did not tell him.
A third of the way along there was a good long stretcher with a fair face on it, and the cement had taken a grip on its top edge that I could not break without taking the edge too.
I sat back on my heels and looked at it.
Then I set the chisel above the arris and took the edge.
It is what I would want done to me. The chip came away and the corner showed raw and pale, and I went on, and I did not look back at it, because looking back does not put it back.
I thought of Nella. Nine years ago she wanted her front room done and she wanted it done in cement because cement was modern and lime was what her grandmother had, and I told her cement was a lie, and she had it done in cement anyway, and her bedroom wall has run with damp every March since.
She is seventy-two. A weekend would put it right.
I have never once offered again, and at every sagra I find her across the boards and lift my eyebrows and say nothing, and she knows exactly what the eyebrows are saying, and I would not trade that for her dry wall. I did it because it was the wall.
So I did not say to Mattia what I had said to Nella.
I did not say cement is a lie. I did not say a single word about lime, then or after, because the man who needs the lecture will not hear it and the man who does not need it did not ask.
I got on my knees where he had been on his knees, and I took his morning's work off the wall an inch at a time, and the sun came up over the range and found me doing it.
He watched. He did not go inside. He had the sense not to help and not the sense to leave, and after a while he crouched a few feet off with his forearms on his knees, and Palla came and put her warm weight against the side of him, and the two of them watched me take it off, chip by chip.
The arithmetic ran under it the whole time, the way it does.
A metre and a half, near enough, of taking-off, and then the re-raking, and then two days on the new joint if the weather held and a day more if it did not, and the days were not an idea, they were a thing I could see, stacked up in front of the frost like sacks against a door.
And under the arithmetic was the part I could not do anything with, the part that had no number.
He had meant it.
That was the whole of it and it did not have a chisel.
A man who did not care would have left the wall alone and gone on offering me money for things.
This one had gone out in the dark, on his knees, at the one wall on the property he was not paying anyone to touch, and had given it the best of his two useless hands, and had got it exactly, beautifully wrong.
It goes into the wall behind the stone and it stays there, and every winter you feel it, and you say nothing.
By the time the run was bare again the light was full and the day was warm and the front of my shirt was grey.
I sat back on my heels. The stone stood there scarred and honest and mine to make good, and Mattia looked at it, at the pale new bite marks all down where his ribbon had been, and then at me, and then at the wall again.
He did not say anything. Something in his face went still and stayed.
The beautiful thing was gone and I had been the one to take it off, careful the whole time, and the dog had leaned her warm weight into his side through all of it, not sorry, not going anywhere.
I did not give him a word for it. He did not reach for one.
He opened his mouth. I picked up the mallet before he could put a price on it.
I had laid a low run of new lime at the foot of the wall two days before, a base to build the make-good off, and it was still green, still soft, hours from taking up.
Fresh intonaco is white — not the white of paint, which sits on top of a thing and calls it clean.
It is the white of the inside of something that has just been opened, a cut apple, a broken stone.
It does not last. In a week it goes the colour of the hill.
For now it was that white, and it ran a metre and a half along the base of the wall like the one clean line in the whole ruin.
Palla stood up off Mattia, stretched front and back, and walked straight through it.
She went the length of it, unhurried, a fat old dog crossing a yard she has crossed for years, and left the whole run printed — four pads and a drag where she turned, over and over, a metre of new lime written all across with a dog who was not sorry because she did not know there was anything to be sorry for.
Mattia came off the ground like the wall was on fire.
He had a float in his hand from somewhere and a rag in the other and he was down at the base of it already, saying no, no, and then more than that, fast, low, in English and then in the language that runs under his English, the one he goes to when he is not thinking, and I have neither of them, and he knew I had neither and he did it anyway because he had to put the sound somewhere.
He was going to smooth it. He was going to lift the prints out while the lime would still let him and give me back my clean line.
"Leave it," I said.
He stopped with the float an inch off the wall.
He looked at me to see if he had the words right.
He had them right. I did not say them again.
I looked at the metre of printed lime a long moment, the pads and the drag and the honest weight of the animal all through it, and I did not fix it and I was not going to let him fix it, and I could not have told him why in his language or in mine.
He put the float down.
Palla had gone to the shade of the fig at the wall head and dropped into it with a grunt, done with the morning, and she put her chin on her paws and shut her eyes, and the prints stayed white at the foot of the wall behind her, drying already, going hard, going to stay hard.
Mattia crouched back down a careful distance from the new lime.
He did not understand it. He understood that the grey ribbon he had made in the night was gone and that the dog's mess was allowed to remain, and he sat with those two facts side by side and could not make them fit, and I watched him not force them.
The scars would be there when the wall outlived both of us. The prints would set by noon and no rain would take them and no season, and in thirty winters a child not born yet would put a hand in one and ask, and there would be nobody who could say.
I raked the bed clean and mixed the make-good and started to give the wall back what the cement had cost it. He watched from the shade with the dog. Somewhere down the valley an engine turned over, the men coming, the day beginning for everyone who was allowed to have one.
"Leave it," I had said. And the prints stayed.