CHAPTER 22
HE JUST SITS DOWN
Matias
The road came up to the village and then quit on it, asphalt to gravel at the last cattle grid, gravel to my track after that, and I had learned that the track was the part I was supposed to be grateful for, because it crossed Valerio's land — his land, everyone's land, the land the lime came up on without anybody ever signing a thing — and gratitude in this place was a currency you paid in laughing, so I laughed when it was called for, and this morning I drove down past all of it to the road to collect the one man in the province who was not going to make me.
He was where I'd told him, by the comune sign with the old bullet holes nobody had ever bothered to explain to me, a bag at his feet and a good coat buttoned to the throat against a cold that had not really arrived yet, and when I pulled in he picked up the bag and got in and put out his hand, once, and shook mine, and that was the whole of it — no squeeze, no clap on the shoulder, no reading of my face for what he could get off it.
"Matias," he said. Not Mattia. My name, the way my mother says it, the s gone soft and the whole thing landing where it was meant to land, and I had not heard it come out of a stranger's mouth since I got off the plane, and I gave him his name back and got it right the first time and did not make a joke of it, which for me is a kind of holiday.
The cold had begun getting into things, early this year, they kept telling me, as if I would know what a normal year felt like here — the light already going flat and orange by five, the north face of the house not warming past a certain hour no matter what the rest of the day did — and Hector rode with his hands flat on his knees and let me drive and did not perform listening and did not perform the other thing either, the pointed not-listening, he was only a man in a seat being carried up a hill by a road he did not own, to a house his family had walked out of and never once come back to look at.
"You found it," I said, which was stupid, he had found a road, and he said that he had, and I pulled back up the track and started in — because that is the thing I do, I fill the car with talk the way you fill a glass, to the brim and a little past, telling him about the cattle grid and the lime lorries and how the village was named for its kilns and how forty people would know he'd arrived before we made the last bend — and while I talked I was doing the other thing I do, which is add it all up.
Six weeks of standing in the tabaccheria and the Questura queue and every kitchen that opened its door to me, explaining, always explaining, where I was from, which was never the answer anybody wanted, and what I'd paid, which they already knew to the euro, and why a man would buy a ruin and not put a pool where the olives are.
And I'd been good at it. I am good at rooms.
And then two nights ago, at a long table in a yard, I had stood up and said a true thing badly, and it had cost me the table, and since that night not one phone in Montecalce had rung for me.
Nella hadn't come by with anything to correct.
Valerio had poured a glass at the exact right second and had the room back inside four seconds and been, if anything, warmer to me since, which was worse than cold and which I did not have the language to explain to myself, in Italian or in anything.
There had been a kitchen or two that opened to me early, back in August, when I was new and funny and the American who'd bought the Semproni place, and I could not have told you the day they stopped opening, only that the not-being-asked had a texture to it now, polite and complete, a door closed so softly you were not allowed to call it shut.
I kept the chalk going anyway. It was the one number in my day that was mine to write down.
The house showed itself the way it always did, last building before the olives, half a roof with the old flat tiles still holding on the half that stayed and the other half open to its sheet, the vault inside cracked along the crown and propped now on its castle of timber so that you had to duck the props to cross under it.
I had stopped seeing it as a wound. Hector looked at it through the windshield for a moment and said nothing about the state of it, which after everyone having a cousin with an opinion was its own kind of present, and then he looked at the door frame, where I'd chalked the number before light — forty-five, because my hands needed the arithmetic and San Martino was the only date anybody in this valley had ever handed me to count toward — and he did not ask about that either.
Inside, in the one room that was warm, he set the bag down, and before he had his arms out of the good coat he told me the date he was leaving.
The thirteenth. A flight already booked, the return already folded into the coat's inside pocket, a hard fact laid on the table before hello was properly finished — I go back on the thirteenth — and I understood that he was telling me the shape of the thing so I would not have to guess at it or host around it, so I would know exactly how much room there was and no more, and it was the sort of courtesy I would have read as cold in anyone else and in him was only clean.
* * *
The gourd was on the table where it always sat, the straw standing in it, the thermos beside, because I make it every morning whether there is anybody here to make it for or not — a whole silent argument I have with the kettle, the water off the boil and then counted down further, further — my mother would have taken the kettle clean out of my hand — and there was nobody in this country to correct or be corrected by.
In the kitchen I grew up in the same gourd sat on the same square of oilcloth and my mother filled it at a stove that never once turned it into a performance, and nobody who came through the door thought they were being brave for drinking it, and in six weeks I had not managed, not once, to make this kitchen be that kitchen, no matter how many people I fed.
Palla was asleep against the warm flank of the bread oven and did not get up for him, which she would not have, she gets up for one person in this comune and it is never a guest.
He sat down. He did not ask what it was.
He did not pick it up and turn it over and squint into it and ask if it was a pipe, if you smoked it, whether it was drugs — Nella had honestly asked me if it was drugs — and then make the noise, the theatrical little horror at the bitterness, the whole performance of the outsider tasting the outsider's thing.
He reached over and his hand went to the bombilla the way a hand goes to a door it has opened ten thousand times, and he drew on it, and topped it off from the thermos, unhurried, the water going in at the side where it goes, and set it down between us on my side, because that is what you do, you pass it on, and nobody had shown him a single motion of it.
I stood there with a dish towel in my hands that I did not need and heard myself start up — did he want it stronger, there was more, I could do coffee if he'd rather, or there was wine, or he must be hungry after the road, there was bread and the good oil, I could put something on — the whole reflex of me, the filling of the glass past the brim, and he let me get all the way to the end of it and then drank again and said, mildly, that it was fine.
That was all. The mate is fine. And he did not answer the coffee or the wine or the bread, he just let them lie where they'd fallen, unanswered, on the floor between us, and it landed like being set down, like a thing that had been carried a long way and was finally put on a table, and I had to turn and do something at the counter for a second so he would not see my face do the thing it was doing.
He was not being kind at me. Everyone for six weeks had been kind at me, aimed it, watched it go in, waited for the American to be grateful, and I had been grateful, I am good at grateful — and this man was not doing any of it in my direction at all, he was just drinking, and being not-aimed-at was so unfamiliar in my body that I mistook it, for a second, standing there with the towel, for being alone in the room, before I understood it was the exact opposite of that.
His phone went off against the wood. He looked at it, said it was his wife, and stepped out into the yard to take it, and through the window I watched him stand in my olives with the phone to his ear, nodding, saying little, and he came back in and picked the gourd up again from where I'd left it refilled for him and told me, without my asking, that she wanted to know whether the man was feeding him — meaning me — and I laughed, a real one, and said I was trying to and being refused.
Later he mentioned a daughter, the older one, who did something with numbers in a bank and thought her father too old to be flying anywhere.
Later than that, a grandson who was three and had opinions.
Both times he said it the way you mention weather you are fond of, no photographs produced, no pause left for me to admire anything, just people he had and would go back to on the thirteenth.
We talked about the papers, because that was why he had come across the world — the cloud on my deed and the signature that would lift it, a cousin's power of attorney that had never quite been the thing it claimed to be — and we did it in the Spanish we share, the vos of it easy in my mouth for the first time since the airport.
I did not have to slow down for him. I did not have to reach for the plain word.
I did not have to be the American being patient at somebody.
I could just talk, at speed, in the language I actually think in, the one with the sh in it that nobody in this comune has ever once heard me use, and he listened and answered flat and short and never made me feel that the mess of the deed was mine to apologize for.
Once, only the once, he looked up from the papers and around the room — the vault above us cracked and held on its timber, the sheet where the roof used to be, the cold coming off the north side of it even here — the way you look at the face of somebody you have been told is a relative and cannot find any of yourself in, and then he looked back down at the papers and did not say whatever it was, if it was anything at all, and I did not ask him to.
His people had left this house a long time before I ever heard of it, had shut the door on it and gone across the world and never come back to look, and now the last of them had flown all that way to sign what was left of it over to me, a stranger, at my own table, and to drink from my gourd on the way, and he did every part of it the way you read a document whose ending you already know.
The gourd went back and forth. He refilled it and passed it to my side without a word and I refilled it and passed it back, and he had every motion of it and had never once been shown one, and neither of us said a word over any of it, and it was the quietest my kitchen had been.
I thought, watching his hands, that at home this was nothing.
An old man drinking at a kitchen table was the least remarkable thing in the world.
Here I had made it a scandal every day for six weeks without meaning to, and the difference between the two rooms was not the gourd, the drink was the same drink, the difference was that in one room you had to explain yourself before you were let to sit down and in the other you just sat down.
He had walked in off a plane from the far side of the world into a kitchen that was not his, in a country that had once used his family's name for a village on its maps, and he had put nothing at all between himself and the table, and I did not have a word for what that did to me and I did not go looking for one out loud.
He drank the last of it and set the gourd down and said thank you, and it was the right time to, and I took it to the sink and stood there a moment with my back to him, and then he asked me, in the plain flat way he asked everything, when I wanted to do the signing, and I told him whenever suited him, there was no hurry, and he said the thirteenth was the hurry, and we should not leave it to the last day, and I said all right, and I meant it, and I did not offer him coffee again.
He sat down and drank and asked nothing, and it was the first time in six weeks I had not had to explain myself in my own kitchen.