CHAPTER 23
THE SAME WALL
Malick
Ibu told me, and he told me wrong, which is how I knew it was true.
He came up on the scooter at the end of the day with his helmet still on, ready to leave in the middle of a sentence, and he said Valerio had gone to the comune about the yard.
About the pit. Somebody was coming to look.
He said it fast and he watched my face while he said it, because he is eighteen and he thinks a man's face is where the news lands.
"Not gone to," I said. "Asked."
"It's the same thing."
"It is not the same thing." I put the last of the sand back under the bench and washed the float in the bucket and set it on its edge to dry, because a wet float left flat will cup. "Gone to is a man with a fist. Asked is a man with a form. Valerio does not use his fist."
Ibu did not understand that and I did not need him to.
He wanted me to be angry so that he could be angry with me, and that is a thing you can give a boy or not, and I did not give it to him.
I told him to take the helmet off in the yard or take himself down the hill, and he took himself down the hill, and Palla, who had come up in the van at seven and slept against the cold side of the wall all day, got up off the ground and came and put her head against my leg, because that is the first thing she does, always, before I have said anything.
So. A man may not stand on the ground his family has stood on for as long as there has been a family, and the man who asked the question did not raise his voice to ask it, and did not come himself, and will be lovely at the next table.
The pit is on il Pratone. It has been down since before the house ever sold, filled and planked, and the water on the putty is not there to keep the water off, the water is the lid.
The yard is on il Pratone. My father stood on il Pratone.
There is no paper anywhere in this country that says the ground is mine and there is no paper that says it is not, and that is the whole of it, and Valerio has decided the comune should look, as a service, and it will look.
It is not the commissione. People think the commissione is where his teeth are, and it is not. His seat gives him nothing over the ground. He is the one whose call gets answered on the first ring. You do not need teeth if the room leans toward you when you open your mouth.
I stood at the drum a while and let it fill and did not think about the yard, and thought about the yard.
My father dug the first pit on that common with a borrowed spade and slaked the lime in it before I could walk, and stood the barrows in the same place I stand them, and nobody wrote his name down for any of it, and the ground did not ask him to prove he could stand on it.
Now a man with mud under his own thumbnail had made a telephone call, kindly, and the ground would be counted.
And in a house up the track there was a wall his hands had also touched, and that too was a thing other men would put on paper this season, one way or the other.
I stood there with the drum going over and said none of it to anyone.
Nella found me at the water later, filling the drum, and she asked me, sideways, the way she asks a thing she does not want the answer to, whether I was all right.
"A green joint," I said, "if the frost comes before it has set, it does not crack in the frost. It looks fine in the frost. It lets go in the thaw."
She looked at me. "That is not an answer, Malick."
"It is the only one I have."
She went back up to her kitchen with her mouth pressed flat, and she was not wrong that it was not an answer, and she was wrong that I had another one. I have never had another one. You ask me how the wall is and I can talk until the light goes. You ask me how I am and the wall answers.
* * *
I did not mean to be in his kitchen that night. I want to put that down plainly, because I am the one who went, and a man should be honest about the door he walked through on his own feet.
The fresco had held me all day. It comes up under the whitewash by the hand's width, and you seal the edge and you veil it and you grout behind it blind, and the whole of the skill is holding a thing to a wall that wants to come off it, holding with your arms up over your head for as long as the setting takes, and not moving, and not shaking, because the shake goes into the lime and the lime remembers.
I had held all day. When I came down off it my hands would not stop.
Not from feeling. From holding. There is a shoulder in me that will not go past a certain place after a day of that, and a place in the left forearm where the old burns are, and by dark the hands were their own small weather and I could not make them be still, and I did not want to drive like that, and the light in his kitchen was on.
He had the door open. He had the door open every night, which no one here does, and Palla went in ahead of me as if it were a house she paid rent in.
The chalk on the frame said forty-two. His hand.
He is the only one who touches the chalk; I have watched him do the arithmetic out loud in the morning, wrong twice and then right, and put the number up in the dark with the side of his fist. Forty-two days.
I looked at it like a gauge already read, and I went in.
He was at the table with the gourd, and he started up out of the chair the way he always starts up, wanting to give me something — a chair, a drink, the good part of whatever there was — and I said his name in my head and did not say it out loud, and I put my shaking hand flat on the table so he would stop.
"Sit," I said. "Down. I came to — " and there the English ran out on me the way it does, the small box of it, and I stood in his kitchen with nothing in the box, and I did the only thing that has ever been mine to do, which is to say the true thing with the few words that are left.
"I came to be here. That is all. Tonight I do not want to drive back. "
He went very still.
"They looked at the pit today," he said. "Ibu told me."
"Ibu tells everyone everything." My hand on the table.
His eyes on my hand. "I did not come for that.
I came because tonight I am tired of the wall and I would like — " and again the box was empty, and I reached in and there was one thing at the bottom of it, and I said it. "I would like your mouth."
He did not laugh and he did not look away and he did not fill the silence, which is the only time I have ever seen him not fill a silence.
He stood up. He came around the table. He took the shaking hand off the wood and held it in both of his, not to still it, only to hold it, and I let him, and that was the yes I gave, spoken first and then in the hand, and nothing in the room was paying me for anything, and the anger of the day did not come with me across the floor.
"You're shaking," he said.
"Not from you."
"I know it's not from me." And then, because he cannot help it, because it is how he is made: "What is it worth, a wall you hold up all day with your arms and nobody pays you for."
"Nothing," I said. "That is why I can do it.
" And I put my ruined thumb against his lower lip, the flat one, the one that a handle made flatter than the other over twenty years, and he opened his mouth against it, and the ease of that was his, all of it, the ease was his and the fear was mine and I went down into the fear the way you go down a scaffold in the dark, one foot found and then the next.
He took me in his mouth on his knees on his own kitchen floor with the dog asleep by the stove, and I said out loud what he was doing while he did it, because I have almost no words and the ones I have I will spend on the truth, and I told him he was to stop if he wanted to stop, and he shook his head with his mouth full and did not stop.
His hands went up under my shirt to the place at the small of my back where the day sits and he pressed there and I made a sound I did not decide to make.
I watched his face. I have been told my whole life what I am supposed to look like and I do not know what I looked like, and I did not care, because he was the thing to look at — the working of his jaw, the wet of his mouth, his eyes coming up to find mine and staying.
Then he stood and got us to the bed the way you get a thing to where it is going, and he lay back and pulled me over him and he was the one at ease, laid open and unhurried and asking with his whole body, and I was the one whose hands still would not be steady when I readied him, slick and slow, one finger and then more, watching to see it land, and he arched off the bed onto my hand and said God and said please and said it again, and I told him I was going to, and I asked him with the words, out loud, was this what he wanted, and he said yes, yes, put it in me, and I did.
I went into him slow and all the way and he took the whole of it with a sound broken in the middle, and I held there, buried, both of us stopped, his heel hooking at the back of my thigh to say do not wait, and I did not wait.
I moved in him and he moved up to meet it and the bed took the two of us and gave nothing back, and I said his name in my head again and swallowed it, because a name in this village is a rope and I would not put a rope on him in his own bed.
I said the other things instead. I said there, is it there, and he said there, and I stayed where there was and worked him there until his hand went white in the sheet and his breath came apart, and I felt him go over it with me still deep in him and my mouth at his throat, and I followed him a stroke later with my face pushed into the side of his neck and my whole day let go at once into him, all of it gone out of my hands.
After, we lay there while the sweat went cold and neither of us reached for the sheet.
The window was open. The cold was coming into the room the way it comes into a house at the end of a day nobody won, down off the north side, off the stone that has not had the sun on it since before Christmas, and I could smell his kitchen from the bed, the wash of the gourd gone bitter and old, and under it the plaster grit that is in everything I own and now was in his bed too.
My hands had gone still at some point and I had not noticed them do it.
That kind of shake does not stop because you decide it will; it stops when the day is spent.
I lay in his bed and turned the hand over in the lamplight, the burns on the back of it, the nails cut down to nothing with the lime in under them that never comes out no matter what you soak them in, and the hand was quiet, and I had done nothing to make it quiet.
He had, maybe. I did not know how to think about that yet and I did not try.
He turned his head on the pillow.
"I say it wrong," he said. "My own name.
I've always said it wrong." He was looking at the ceiling, at the crack in the vault that runs the crown, the one he told me once looked like a crack in a ceiling.
"I knew it before I ever came here. My mother said it right and I heard her say it right my whole life and I say it the other way anyway, the easy way, so nobody has to work for it.
" He stopped. "I still do it. I did it yesterday.
I do it because it costs me nothing and it never once occurred to me that it should. "
I did not tell him what that was. He had given me a true thing and made himself smaller with it and not sadder, and I knew what that cost, because I had come there to do the same, and I had not done it yet, and now the room was quiet and open and there would not be a better floor to set it on.
I put my hand on the wall over the bed. His wall. The inside face of the north wall, warm now on this side from the two of us and the lamp, cold on the other, always cold on the other.
"My father pointed that wall," I said. "In your house." And I did not say anything else about it.