CHAPTER 14
A SLIP OF PAPER
Matias
By the better part of a week into the silence I had started talking to the scaffolding, which is not a thing you tell people about afterward.
The site had been shut since the second and nothing had moved on it since, the props exactly where they were, the sheet over the open half of the roof making the same slow breathing sound it had made the day they hung it, and a man can only chalk a number on a door frame and drink one more coffee so many times before he starts narrating the coffee to the room, out loud, like the room has been waiting to hear about it.
Sixty-four. I did the number that morning the way I did it every morning, in the dark before it was properly light, the stick of chalk gone down to a stub I kept meaning to replace and never did because replacing it would have meant it was a thing, and it was not a thing, it was just the one job my hands were allowed to have.
Sixty-four days to the party nobody had fully explained to me yet, the oil and the fires and the wine, and I liked the shape of the four more than the six, and I stood there liking it like an idiot, and then I heard Palla come around the corner of the house at her one speed, which is the speed of a dog who has decided the day owes her something.
The pause had done something to the hill.
When the machines were running there was a reason for people to drift up the track and stand and have an opinion, and now there was no noise to gather around and the drifting had thinned to nothing, and I had gone on cooking for a crew that was not coming, out of habit, out of hope, big pots of things I then ate for days like a man doing penance for optimism.
I had taught myself to take the coffee the way they took it, standing, fast, no sitting down, and there was nobody now to stand next to.
Malick had told me about the tissue on his way out.
He did that — said the necessary thing and then was gone before you could hang anything else on it, a whole sentence's worth of instruction delivered from already halfway to the van, and I had learned by now not to answer it with three questions the way I wanted to, because he would answer the first one and let the other two fall on the ground where I had dropped them.
There was a box on the bench by the bottega door, he'd said, he'd set it out there for me before he went.
The thin tissue, the facing, for the wall.
Bring it up when I had a minute. He had all the minutes in the world just then and so did I, that was the joke of it, the whole valley on a legal pause and the two of us with nothing between us and November but weather, but he'd said when I had a minute like there was a queue, and I'd said sure, of course, sure, and he'd been gone.
And I knew it for what it was, more or less, in the place where you know a thing and choose not to open it.
There was no hurry on that tissue. There was no hurry on anything; the whole site was a held breath with a sheet over it.
He had found me a box to carry the way you find a kid a job so the kid will get out of the doorway of the thing the grown men are doing, and I was the kid, the one who owned the ground everybody had been standing on and had to be given an errand to keep him from underfoot on it.
I took it anyway. You take the box. Carrying the wrong box beats standing next to the one wall in the country I am not allowed to put a hand on.
So I went down for the tissue because it was a thing to carry and I am a man who feels better carrying something.
Palla came with me as far as the two steps down into the yard and then stopped, because Palla does not do steps that go the wrong way for her, and she stood at the top of them with her whole body turned into a complaint, looking down at me, looking at the steps, looking back down at me, until I did the thing I swore in New Jersey I would never be, which is a man who picks up a dog that is not his, badly, with both arms and no plan, a warm difficult barrel of a dog who went stiff with dignity the whole way and then forgave me the instant her feet touched the stones and trotted off to put her nose to the crack under the bottega door like she'd walked down on her own four legs.
She is not my dog. I keep saying that to people and to myself.
She eats at every house on the hill and she has never once, not for a second, been mine.
* * *
I did not go inside, and I want that on the record — the door was shut, the way he keeps it, and I have never once seen the far side of it and did not see it now.
A man's workshop is a kind of undressing and you do not go feeling for the buttons of it when he is not there.
I had spent a lot of my life in rooms that belonged to men I was paying, and you learn the manners of it, you keep your hands where they can be seen and you touch nothing that is set down in an order.
So I kept to the yard side of it and left the door alone.
But the smell of the place had come up off the box where it sat on the bench, soaked into the cardboard from wherever it had been kept — cold ash and oil and wet stone and something faintly sweet underneath that I could not place and did not try to — and it was the smell of a person, the way a coat is, and I stood there over a box in a cold yard and felt like I had opened a coat.
I said something then, out loud, to the shut door, the way you do — I don't even remember what, that it was cold out here, that he kept whatever was behind it neater than any room I owned, some nothing, pitched at the door like he might open it and answer me.
He didn't. The yard took my voice and gave me back the size of itself, which is the thing about talking to a place: it tells you exactly how alone you are, and it waited to see whether I'd do it again.
I did it again. Then I made myself quit, because there is a kind of talking that is company and a kind that is a man coming apart quietly in somebody's yard, and I know where the line is between them and I had a foot across it.
The box was on the bench where he'd said.
Of course it was. I have never once been given a direction by that man that turned out to be off by an inch.
I put my hand on it — flat, the way he does, and I caught myself doing it and felt stupid, like a man trying on somebody else's walk — and I lifted it, and it came up light, tissue is nothing, tissue is basically the idea of paper, and stuck to the underside of it there was a slip.
It had gone damp at some point and dried against the bottom of the box and it came away with a small sound.
Thermal paper, the kind the print is already fleeing from, the kind you get for a coffee and a scratch card, curling at both ends.
I peeled it the rest of the way off because it was going to fall otherwise and I am constitutionally unable to let a piece of paper fall, and I turned it over to see which way was up, and I stood there in the cold of the yard reading a thing I could not read.
Because that is the situation, and it does not stop being funny to me even when it stops being funny.
I cannot read this country. I own a house in it and I cannot read the bill for the house, and I cannot read the sign that tells me which way the good bread is.
I can read numbers. Numbers are the one language they forgot to change on me at the border, and there were numbers on this slip, so I read those, the way a man reads the only three words he knows in a paragraph and builds the rest out of hope.
A bank. A transfer — I know the shape of a transfer, everybody knows the shape of a transfer, money leaving a place and going to a place.
It was going to a place in Buenos Aires.
I knew that word without reading anything around it because it is my mother's whole face, it is a city I have stood in for maybe nine weeks of my life and claimed for all of it, and seeing it here on a curl of dying paper in a lime-cold yard in the mountains made me smile, actually smile, alone, like I'd run into somebody from home in an airport.
Somebody up here had people down there too.
I filed it to tell him, even — that is the honest measure of where my head was standing — I was going to say, hey, listen, look at this, Buenos Aires, my mother's whole family, funny, no?
, small world, the way you hold out a thing you have in common like a plate of food, here, this is for you, sit down.
I had the sentence built. I was warming it up in my mouth while I read.
Eight hundred. That number was clean, unmissable, the print had held on it.
Eight hundred euro, out of here, down to there.
And a date, off in the corner where the dates go, and the year on it I could read the way I can read any of them, because a year is just a number with its shoes on — 2022, four digits in a corner — and it meant nothing to me, I could not have told you one thing that happened to me inside it, and none of that meant anything except the pleasant small arithmetic of a stranger's life, a rent, a mother, a brother, a debt somebody was good about, the kind of steady quiet paying-down that people do for people they are tied to, month after month, and never talk about at a table.
It was a family thing. You can smell a family thing on a piece of paper. I have sent a few myself.
There were more of them. Under the first one, held in a clip I had not seen because the box had been sitting on it, a little sheaf, the same tired paper, the same corner curling the same way.
I did not count them — could not, maybe, my eye sliding off the stack the way it slides off a menu I can't read — but I did not fan them out and I did not turn any of the others over.
I held the one. I held it longer than there was any reason to hold it.
I was standing in a yard I had been sent down to and not brought into, holding a piece of another man's paper, and the light had come off the top of the hill and started down the face of the house, from the color it is at noon to the color it gets before it starts to leave, and I could not have told you what I was waiting for.
My thumb had gone over the print of it a couple of times without my telling it to, the way you worry a coin in a pocket, and the ink surrendered a little more each pass, the date holding on and the rest of it going, and still I did not put it down.
It was warm from my hand by then. That is the piece I have kept, out of all of it — a stranger's slip of nothing, warm from my hand, gone soft at the fold, and me standing over it in the yard with the whole afternoon draining out of the sky and no reason on this earth I could have named for why my fingers would not open.
I put it back is what I should say next. I did not put it back. I heard the van.
* * *
He got down out of the van, and the dog went to his leg before he was properly out of it, before he'd said a word, put her head against the side of his knee the way she does and he let her without looking down, and I started talking, because he was here and the silence had been long and I had a mouth.
"There she is, your box, I found it, I was going to bring it up, I got waylaid by the — she can't do the steps, did you know that, your dog, she stands there and files a complaint, I carried her down like a sack, don't tell anyone.
" I was doing the thing where I keep the moment open by putting one more clause in the door so it can't close.
"It's quiet down here, I like it, I've been talking to the scaffolding, that's a joke, mostly.
Listen, the house is fine, nothing's fallen down, I checked the — the thing in the ceiling, the crack, it's the same, no? "
He said, "The same." He had a way of taking a word I'd used and handing it back cleaned off.
"Right, the same." I was aware of the slip in my hand and not aware of it, the way you carry your keys.
"God, I don't miss much, do I. Down here.
I'll tell you the truth, the house was the easy part, the whole — the buying, I mean, I flew over, it was an afternoon, it was quicker than getting a phone put in.
I didn't even push on the number, my mother would have killed me, you're supposed to push, and I didn't, I signed it and shook the man's hand and that was the house.
Cash and a handshake and done, everybody very happy.
" I heard myself laugh at it, the way I laugh at things first so nobody has to do it for me.
"The money was never the problem here, that's the thing nobody believes.
It's the roof I'm not allowed to look at. "
He did not do anything. I want to be exact about that because I have gone back over it since and there is nothing in it to find.
His face did not change. He was looking at my hand, not at my face, and I thought for a second he was going to say something about the tissue being crushed, and what he said was, "That the right weight? "
"The — this?" I looked down at the box on the bench like he'd caught me stealing it, and I had forgotten it was even the errand. "I don't know. It's tissue. It's tissue-weight."
"Bring the box." He came the last few steps to me, unhurried, and I felt the small paper still between my fingers and I lifted it a little, half a question, the start of what is this, and I never got the what out.
He took it out of my hand. Not fast. He did not snatch it, there was nothing in it to snatch, he took it the way you take a thing off a shelf you have taken it off a thousand times, and he opened the door — I stayed where I was, because you do not go into that room behind a man — and in the dark of it he pulled a drawer that ran badly and had to be lifted at the front to open, and he put the slip in the drawer, and he lifted it again to shut it, and it shut.
"Mattia," he said. "The light will be gone by five. Take the box."