CHAPTER 10
STANDING UP IN THE YARD
Matias
The decision was that I would pay for the week.
I had it worked out on the walk down. Not the job — the job had an invoice, a real one, a number in a language I could not read that I paid anyway because paying was the thing I understood.
This was the other week. The one where I had gone out to the north wall at night, in the only hours the law left me, and pointed two metres of it with my own hands, proud as anything, and Malick had come at seven and looked at it a long time and said we'll take it off, and taken it off, and a week that I had bought was gone into the ground because of me.
That had a cost. Everything had a cost. I just needed the number.
He was at the low wall by the oven, doing nothing, which for him was a kind of work — he was watching the fire the way other men watch a pot.
I came up beside him with the whole thing ready, the loan of the lime again, the sand again, whatever the days were worth, put it on my thing, I'll cover the crew for the time, and I said it lightly, I said it like a favour I was doing us both, because that was how you made a big thing small enough for a man to take.
He put a flat hand on the top of the wall. Then he said, "Cement on that face. In ten years it blows the stone off, from the inside."
I waited for the part of it that was about the money.
There wasn't a part of it that was about the money.
He was telling me about a wall in ten years, flat, the way you'd read a weather report for a day you would not be there for, and I stood there with my number in my mouth and nowhere to set it down.
I tried it from the side that has never once failed me anywhere else in my life.
Put it on the job, I said. Buy the lime again, the sand, the days, run it through the invoice so it isn't a favour, so it's just a line on a page, so nobody has to feel anything about it.
He knocked a flake of dry mortar off the edge of the trowel with his thumbnail.
"Lime keeps," he said. "You don't buy it twice."
Which was information, and was true, and was not an answer, and I have gone back to that sentence a lot since and I still cannot find the place in it where the money was supposed to go.
So I did what I do. I put it down to pride — he was a proud man, I decided, generously, on his behalf, a craftsman who could not be seen to take extra for a fault that had been mine, except when I turned it over it had been my fault, my night, my two metres, and I could not make him hold that one either.
So I went and found the impresa's man, who was on his second plate and a great deal more willing to talk to me, and I put it to him sideways — the crew had lost days, the days were mine to make good, surely there was a line on some sheet where a man could set it right.
He was warm about it. He was warm the way you are warm to a child who has offered to buy the sea.
He said a thing with the shape of yes in it and none of the weight — we'd sort it, don't worry about it — and reached past me for the bread, and I understood that I had been handled, kindly and completely, by a professional, and that no money was going to move over a wall a man had scraped clean for a reason that was not written on any sheet I could pay against.
"Mattia," Fatou said, from the oven, without turning around. "Come and carry this and stop bothering people."
* * *
By noon there were forty people in the yard and no chairs, or four chairs, held in reserve for a war nobody was fighting, and everybody was eating standing up.
I have seen crowded tables. My mother set one every Sunday of my childhood in a kitchen in New Jersey and it was never this full.
The thieboudienne came out of the house in a pot the size of a drum and got served onto whatever a person was holding: a real plate, a saucer, the flat of a hand, once, memorably, a magazine.
Fish and rice and oil and a smoke coming off the grill that got into the wine and the wine got into everybody.
The wine came out of a cellar that as far as I could tell belonged to nobody and everybody, bottles arriving in people's hands from directions that had held no bottles a minute before, getting opened, getting drunk, the empties going back the way they came.
I stood in the middle of a language I did not have, next to a second language I also did not have, while the whole yard laughed at something and folded me into the laughing without letting me anywhere near what it was about, and I was, and I mean this, happier than I had been in years.
It did not touch the thing. I noticed that and put it away.
I tried to host. It is not a decision, hosting, it is more like a reflex the body has instead of standing still — I started asking who was still coming, and was there enough, and should somebody put the salad where people could reach it, and a woman I had met twice took the salad out of my hands and set it exactly where it had already been.
I tried to refill a glass and the glass was taken from me and refilled by its owner, who patted my arm for it.
I went to turn a piece of fish on the grill that was plainly two seconds from ruin, and a woman with a cloth in her hand looked at me the way you look at a man reaching into a lion, and I put both hands in my pockets and left them there.
I tried to find a plate for an old man leaning on the gate and the old man already had a plate behind his back, like a boy hiding a cigarette, and he showed it to me, delighted, and ate off it, watching me the whole time.
Four women, four separate times, gently and completely stopped me from doing the one thing I know how to do at a party, which is to work it.
I was a guest at a table I had convinced myself, on no evidence, that I was throwing.
The gourd saved me. I had brought it because it was mine — the only thing in that valley that came from my actual life, the mate and the bombilla, and I set it out on the wall half as an offering and half as a flag, and Fatou was on it before I had the water right.
She took the bombilla, she took a pull, she did not make the face everyone makes the first time, she made the other face, the one that means a person has found a thing they intend to keep, and she looked at me over it with an expression I can only call proprietary.
"How long does it stay good," she said.
"You keep adding water. Till it washes out."
"Good," she said, like I had passed something, and did not give it back, and I understood, watching her, that she would be drinking it at seven in the morning for the rest of my life and would never once admit I had brought it.
She was smug about how fast she had taken to it. She said so. She said it to Nella.
The gourd went round after that whether I passed it or not.
It left my hands and did not come back for the better part of an hour, man to man to a boy who was too young for it and drank anyway and coughed and was proud, and it came back to me warm from other mouths with the water gone to nothing, washed out exactly the way I had told her it would be, and I refilled it and it left again.
I had carried one thing that was mine into that yard, one, and the yard had simply taken it, cheerfully, without asking, and made it theirs, and at the time it felt like the kindest thing that had ever been done to me.
Nella would not touch it. On principle, she said, and the principle was a different principle from the one she had given the week before about the same gourd, and it was a third one entirely from a principle I had heard her attach to something else, and nobody in that yard called her on any of it because being wrong out loud, confidently, at length, was simply a thing Nella did, the way weather does weather, and you planned around it.
She had told me twice already that the fig tree growing out of my west wall was two hundred years old and protected by law and could never come down, and I had learned not to carry either half of that down to Dario, who had made a face at the first half and a worse face at the second.
Nella held her opinions the way other people hold land, and she walked the fences of them daily, and the village let her, because a person has to be allowed something, and she had outlived most of the people who might once have set her straight.
And the oven war reached its truce, or its armistice, or whatever you call the thing between two women who will die before they say the true sentence.
Fatou's torta al testo and Nella's were on the same board, a hand apart, and everyone in that yard knew which was which and everyone took some of both and said lovely things to both faces, and I watched Nella be gracious in public with a face that was doing something quite different underneath, and I watched Fatou be gracious right back with a face that was frankly enjoying itself, and then I watched Fatou win.
She did it on purpose. She moved her board a few inches into the light, she cut hers into the pieces that photograph, she pressed a piece on the sindaco's wife with both hands like a benediction, and Nella's stayed square and whole and slightly too far from the wine, and it was not kindness and it was not wisdom, it was appetite, and Fatou had a mean streak in her a mile wide and she liked to win and she was, at that moment, the least wise person in the yard and the most alive, and I loved her for it a little.
"I didn't vote in June last year," Nella said, to me, cheerfully, apropos of the frittelle, "it was hot, and it was a Sunday," and she took another of Fatou's pieces off the winning board and ate it, and the sentence went into the yard and the yard closed over it like water and nobody said a word, and Malick, twenty feet off, holding a crate he had not been asked to hold, did not change his face by a degree, and I understood none of it and carried it away anyway, because that is what you do with a thing you cannot read: you fold it up and you keep it, in case it turns out later to have been a number.
The afternoon did what those afternoons do.
The light came down off the hill and went long and gold through the grill smoke and nobody hurried it along.
Children ran a game whose rules changed every time an adult turned to look.
Two men I did not know told each other a story I could not follow and wept laughing at it, and I laughed a beat behind, on faith, and gathered much later that it had been about a goat.
Somebody's grandfather fell asleep sitting straight up against the warm flank of the oven with a full glass balanced on one knee, and for the better part of an hour not a drop of it moved.
I ate too much. I gave up on the salad. I let a plate be brought to me by a girl of about nine who took the job very seriously, and I sat on the wall where I was put, and for a stretch of maybe twenty minutes I did not try to buy, settle, host, or square a single thing, and it was the closest I had come to peace since the notary's office in June, and I did not examine that either.
* * *
Palla came through at her own pace, at what I worked out was her fourth house of the day, on business, unhurried, a professional.
She did the rounds. She took a corner of fish off a saucer that a man lowered for her without breaking his conversation, and she leaned her whole weight against Malick's leg for the length of one long breath, and moved on.
Somebody called across the yard for the wine, and then somebody called for me.
"Mattia," he called — a man by the gate, waving the empty bottle, warm, easy — and my mouth opened, and nothing came out of it.
He waved the bottle again and I found the wine and brought it and poured it, and the moment closed over the way the yard closed over everything, and I was, again, delighted.
I found Malick later, at the wall by the cooling oven, and I had it in my head to try the week one more time, from a different side, because there is always a different side, and I was three months into a country and had not yet found the wall my money would not go through.
He was scraping ash off the stone with the edge of a trowel, slow, for no reason anyone had asked him to, the way a man does a thing his hands do on their own, and I opened my mouth to make my offer small enough to take.
Fatou got there first with the pot.
"You're too thin," she told me, which was a lie, and she put more fish on my plate that I had not asked for and could not refuse, and she looked at Malick and said something to him in Wolof, short, and he answered her in one word, and whatever it was it was not about me and it was not about the week, and the week, I understood, standing there with a plate I did not want and could not put down, was simply not going to be a thing anyone let me pay for, not now, not from a different side, not ever.
I offered to pay for the week. Fatou laughed at me and put more fish on my plate, and nobody mentioned the week again.