CHAPTER 20
SINCE BEFORE YOU CAME
Matias
Fifty-one, the door frame said, in my own chalk, from yesterday.
I wiped it off with the side of my hand and wrote fifty under the smear, and that was the first thing my hands did that morning and it was the only thing they were going to be allowed to do all day, and I did it in the dark so I would not have to watch myself do it.
Then I sat down at the table and looked at what I had taken.
Bank slips. The flimsy thermal kind that goes to nothing if you keep it in a warm pocket, that the machine coughs at you and you drop in a drawer and never see again.
There was a word printed on every one of them that I had, God help me, learned — versamento, one of the maybe nine words I owned in this whole country, and I had learned it the way you learn a number, by seeing it sitting next to money.
There was an account number that told me nothing, and a name I could not have read to you, and a date, and under the date a figure.
And the figure I could read. Because a number is a number in Spanish and in English and in the Italian I can't read a line of, and a number was the only thing in this place that had ever given me a straight answer without my having to read it first.
Eight hundred. Eight hundred. Six hundred. Eight hundred.
Some of them were already going. The print on the oldest ones had begun to lift off the paper the way a bruise fades from the middle out, and when I pressed a thumb to a faint one to hold it still under my eye the heat of my own hand took another week off it, so I learned, in about a minute, to stop touching them and to tip them into the light instead.
It is a stupid, careful thing to know how to do.
I laid them out in rows, because rows are what I have here instead of Italian.
That is the thing I do with a page I cannot read — I put it in an order and I let the order say the sentence for me, and I did it now the way you'd lay coins on a bar to be sure, oldest at the top left, working down and across.
The oldest one was from a September. When I found the year on it and did the small arithmetic — the little jolt a stair gives you when the floor is not where your foot swore it would be — I stopped moving for a while.
Four years. He had been carrying eight hundred euro down to a bank and sending it to a name in Buenos Aires, in the rain and out of it, for the house I had bought in one afternoon in June with a folder and a cashier's draft and a pen a notary put in my hand and took back before the ink was dry.
Somewhere in the counting my hands went quiet on the wood and stayed quiet, and for as long as it takes a kettle to climb from silence into noise the weight I had been carrying since June set itself down somewhere and I let it set down, and then a car door shut out in the yard and I bent and picked it back up.
For a while I tried to make them into a different story, the way you do.
A man is thorough. A man likes a receipt.
A man in this valley trusts a bank about as far as he trusts the weather, so he keeps the paper, every slip of it, in a drawer that has to be lifted to come open.
The city the money had gone to I half-knew — it was my mother's city, the one I have spent maybe nine weeks of my whole life inside — and there was a grief folded down small inside that which I chose, standing there at my own table, not to open out.
I tried the thorough-man story, and three thinner ones under it, and each came apart faster than the one before, until there was only the plain one left.
I had taken the slips off the bench by the bottega door.
I want to be exact with myself about that, since exact is the one thing left that I can still be.
The clip had sat out there in the weather since the day I carried the tissue box up, nobody minding it, and I had gone out five days back and peeled one off and told myself it was an errand, and I had gone back and this time I took the whole clip, and put it inside my jacket against my chest and walked it down the track like a man carrying something out of a fire.
Nobody stopped me. Nobody in this comune has ever once stopped me from lifting a thing off a bench in an open yard. Nobody stopped me.
* * *
I went out into the yard to practice.
That is a thing a man can be reduced to, at thirty-seven, in a country he came to on purpose: standing in his own yard rehearsing another man's name, so that when he finally says it out loud his voice will have somewhere to go afterward.
"Malick," I said, to the olives, to the dog that wasn't there yet. "Malick, I need you to tell me—"
And that was the whole of it. That was as far as the sentence would go.
I tried it four or five ways and it quit in the same place every single time, right at the verb, right where I would have had to name the thing I wanted told, and I could not put the word there, because putting it there would make it a thing that had happened to a real person instead of a story I could still, for one more minute, keep from finishing.
I said the front half of it out to the trees a few more times anyway — Malick I need you to tell me, Malick were you, Malick did you — and every road out of the name dead-ended, and the birds kept on with their small ordinary business in the olives as though a grown man standing in a field talking to it were the most unremarkable weather in the world, which, in this comune, in the yard where I was standing, it may genuinely have been.
The morning went on doing its ordinary lovely nothing around me, the top of the hill turning gold and the bottom of it staying cold the way it does, and I stood in the middle of that with half a sentence in my mouth and both hands with nowhere to be, and after a while I gave up and went back inside and got the money instead.
Money I could finish. Money has an end to it.
* * *
The site was working again. It had come back a few days before — the men, the noise, the little machine that turns over and over near the far wall the whole morning — and the vault stood propped inside its castle of timber the way it had stood since August, and half the roof was still on over the east end with the old flat tiles going grey in the light, and I was not allowed within ten metres of any of it.
They had run a tape across the yard on two steel pins.
The one with the clipboard — the safety one, polite, not unkind, a man with a lanyard and a job to keep — would not sign me across it, and never had, not once from the first day.
He had explained it to me one time, slowly, in the careful voice you use on a foreigner and a child at the same moment, and none of it had been about me.
There was a form. The form was about other men, about who carried insurance and who did not, and inside that line I was a problem two other men would have to answer for if a beam came down on my head.
So he kept me out of my own yard to keep himself out of a courtroom, and he was right to, and I had stopped, some weeks back, being able to turn it into a joke at parties.
So I stood where the tape let me stand and listened to my house get worked on by men whose names I did not have.
It is a particular sound, that, coming off a place with your name on the deed and other men's hands on its walls — trowels, and a voice calling a measurement twice, and the little mixer turning its one dull note over and over, all of it ten metres off and behind a plastic line, close enough to smell the wet lime and not close enough to be handed a bucket.
I had held the deed to this house for three months.
I had been inside it fewer times than the dog.
I stood at the tape until he saw me.
He came over the way he comes over to anything, without hurry, wiping his hands down the front of his thighs, and behind him a man crossed the yard with a hod up on one shoulder and did not look at either of us, and I was glad and not glad that we had a witness for it.
"I want to give it back," I said. The envelope was already in my hand, which was the stupidest possible way to do this, and I did it anyway, because doing it well was never one of the things on offer.
"What you paid in. All of it, whatever the number is, I'll wire it, I can have it moved today — and you keep the wall, you finish all of it, the fresco, however long it takes, on my—"
I heard it coming and I stepped off it.
"—on the house," I said. "However long it takes."
He looked at the envelope for about the length of time it takes him to decide a crack has moved since the last time he read it.
Then he looked at me, and I waited for the rest of it the way I have been waiting for the rest of it since the first week, and there was no rest of it.
There is never any rest of it with him. And then he gave me the only more he had.
"No," he said. And then, because I was still standing there holding the thing out: "Lime goes off in the frost, Mattia."
And he went back in past the tape, to the wall, and left me at the edge of my own yard with a thing in my hand that could not be spent, and no idea in the world why the no had not been pride. It looked like pride.
I stood there a while longer than there was any reason to.
The man with the hod came back the other way, empty now, and this time he did glance at me — a quick, incurious, country glance, the kind that has already decided what you are and filed it away — and then the mixer coughed and caught and the wall took him back, and I put the envelope away in my jacket, in the same inside pocket the slips had ridden down the hill against my chest that morning, which struck me, standing there in the last of the sun, as a joke that not one person alive would have found funny, myself the very least of them.
* * *
Fatou came at the end of the afternoon for a dish of hers that had been sitting washed on my counter since a Sunday two weeks gone. She wanted it back, and she said so before she had both feet through the door — which I had learned, from her, was a kind of manners and not the lack of one.
Then she saw the table.
She stopped with one hand already on the dish and looked at the rows of faded slips laid out across the wood the way you look at a mess a child has made out of something that was never a toy, and what came up in her face was not softness, none of it.
It was irritation, clean and old and worn smooth, and it went up the hill, past me, at her son.
She put the dish down. She took the knife from beside my stove and pulled the board toward her and started in on an onion I had left out on the counter, because her hands, like his, do not know how to be in a room and hold still.
I did not say anything. I had not, I realised, watching her, said much of anything out loud the whole day — not to the man at the tape past the little speech I had wrecked, not to the dog, not to the house, and I am a man who talks to houses, who has narrated this one to himself since the first afternoon like a boy telling himself a story to fall asleep inside of.
The quiet felt like a jacket put on the wrong arm first. Fatou did not remark on it.
She is not a woman who fills a silence for the comfort of whoever is sitting in it; she let it sit there and worked her onion, and it was, I think, the kindest thing on offer in the room, and she did it without deciding to.
Palla had come in behind her. Palla comes in behind everyone.
She put her chin on the edge of the table, and while I was watching Fatou and not the dog she took the half of my lunch I had not been able to touch and ate it without any hurry at all, and then she lay down across my feet, both of them, heavy and warm and settling with a groan like a much older complaint, and it was the first time since I got to this place that the dog had chosen me for anything, and it happened on that day out of all the days there were, and not one word got said about it by anybody.
"Thirty-eight thousand," Fatou said to the onion, not to me. "I told him. You do not put money up in the air and stand there waiting for it to come back down a house. He does not listen. He has never once listened, that one, not to me."
The sentence I had spent the entire day unable to get to the end of, she finished with a vegetable in her hand and did not so much as notice she had done it.
She had been in my kitchen for something under two minutes.
She would stay a little longer — long enough to bring the onion to nothing and tell me a thing or two I had no use for — and then she would take her dish and go back up the hill to the house where her son was sitting being right about lime.
She talked, after that — about the dish, about whether I had used it and what for, about somebody's grandson who was driving now and driving it too fast, and I caught maybe a third of it, and the onion came apart under her hands into pieces so thin and so even they were almost nothing, and the light went down slow in the window behind her head.
My feet had gone to sleep under the dog and I did not move them.
"He's been paying for that house since before you came," she said, and went back to the onions, because it was not news.