CHAPTER 24
NINE SECONDS
Matias
Forty, I chalked on the door frame before the sun had cleared the ridge, standing on the stone that had been the threshold since before anyone who would sit at my table that night was born, and the four came out fat and the zero came out lopsided and I left it, because it was chalk, because it had never once been the point that it looked like anything, only that my hand had something to do with itself that no clerk could fine me for.
Forty days to the party the whole valley called by the name it also used, I had learned, for the day you moved out.
I had stopped finding that funny somewhere around the last time the table had been full and I had said a true thing at it, and the true thing had cost me, and nothing had changed except that now the village said Mattia to my face a little more carefully, the way you say a name to a man who has been sick.
They came at seven. My yard, my long table, the boards I had bought and the trestles I had borrowed and the wine that came, as it always came here, out of a fridge that belonged to nobody and was never empty, and I stood at the head of it for exactly as long as it took the village to arrange itself, and then I was not at the head of it anymore.
Nobody moved me. That is the thing about it I still cannot explain to you: nobody takes your chair, nobody says a word, there is simply a good end of a table and a foot of it, and the good end assembles itself around the man it assembles around, and you look up from pouring for somebody and you are at the foot, in your own yard, holding the bottle, which at least gives your hands a job, and I have always been grateful, my whole life, for anything that gives my hands a job.
The house stood over us the way it stood over everything, the half of the roof still on it dark against the last of the light, the sheet over the gone half lifting a little and settling, the propped vault inside holding its cracked breath in the dark, and I thought, the way I thought it every single evening and never out loud, that I owned all of that and could not touch one stone of it, and then Fatou put a plate in front of me and told me to eat and stop looking at my own house like it owed me money.
It was, I should say, a lovely night. One of the loveliest nights I have had in my life.
The food came the way food comes here, in waves, off the stone and out of ovens I will never own, and Nella held the whole foot of the table hostage to a story about a wedding forty years gone and got the bride wrong, confidently, at volume, and nobody corrected her because everybody had given up correcting Nella somewhere in the last century, and a boy fell off the low wall and did not cry, and the wine kept arriving, and I sat there at the foot of my own table pouring for people who had not asked and being thanked and thanking them back, hosting from the cheap seats, and it was warm, it was so warm, and I want that on the record before I tell you what happened.
She had come with a bowl of something and she was seated well, up near Valerio, because Valerio had carried her chair for her and asked about her knees and — this is the part I could not get my mouth around, the part I turned over on the drive back from nowhere in my own head — because he had asked about her knees the last time too, and remembered the answer.
He was lovely to her. He is lovely. I want to be very clear, because you will think I am building a case and I am not building anything: he poured for her first, he laughed at the thing she said about her sister's grandson, he leaned in when she talked so she would not have to raise her voice, and she liked it, she liked him, she has liked him for years, and her son — her son was not at this table, and I had stopped asking myself, on the page of my own head where I asked myself things, why Malick was never at a table where I was, now.
I knew why. Everyone at that table would have known why, and none of them would have said it, and that is the whole engineering of the place, that the thing everyone knows holds up the roof and nobody names it, like the props inside the house.
"Boccali," said the man beside me, trying to help, because I had said it wrong again, said my own name the way my mouth had always said it, the soft way, the Buenos Aires way, and three people leaned in delighted to fix it, rolling the double letter, putting the stone back in the middle of it where it belonged, and I said it after them wrong again, and they laughed, and I laughed first, before them, the way I always got there first.
And down the table Hector said it the way I said it.
Soft. Wrong for here, right for me. He was not correcting anyone.
He was reaching for the bread and he said the name the way it sounded in the only house it had ever sounded in, our house, the New Jersey kitchen and the Buenos Aires one behind it that I had spent maybe nine weeks of my life inside, and he did not care that it was wrong for the valley, he did not even notice it was a thing you could be wrong about, and he put butter on the bread.
He had come five days ago from the other end of the earth and sat down at a kitchen in Umbria and seen the gourd on the table, my gourd, the one object I own that is actually mine, and he had said nothing at all, and picked it up, and drunk, and handed it back, che, and gone on with his coat still on, and I had had to go stand by the sink for a minute like a fool.
* * *
Valerio told the story over the second bottle, and he told it beautifully.
He told it to the table but he told it at Hector, the gallant way, the way that is a gift and that you cannot interrupt without being the rude one, his hand open toward the man like he was presenting him.
The Semproni. Two hundred years in these hills, he said, the old family, the good land, the casale that was the last house before the olives and the finest of them in its day, and how they had held it and held it and then the times turned and there was nothing here for anybody, and they had gone — he said gone the way you say a man died well — gone across the water and made their lives, and what a thing, what a shame and what a thing, that the house had sat and come down to this, and now look, now one of them comes back and sits at our table, and isn't it something, the way a family goes out into the world and the stone stays and waits.
He said it was after the war. He said the land had been the best on the hill.
He said they had left because the heart went out of the place.
He was warm and he was admiring and every third thing he said was a little bit wrong, the pleasant wrongness of a man narrating a life he was never inside, and Hector sat there with the whole of his own family in another man's mouth, being handed to him corrected, and buttered his bread.
I knew the shape of it. I had watched it done once before, in August, at a longer table, to a man twenty feet away carrying a crate, and I had laughed half a second late that time and heard myself do it, and I had never once, in the three months since, done the only thing there was to do about it, which was open my mouth.
Hector opened his.
"Sixty-eight," he said. Pleasant. Flat. He did not put down the bread.
"I was born that year. There was no work, so they went where there was work.
It wasn't the heart going out of the place, it was a train ticket, and my grandmother cried the whole way to Genoa and then she stopped, because there was a lot to do.
" He said it in about the time it takes to say it, no longer, a single dry correction laid on the table like a man laying down a card he does not particularly want but has, and then he reached for the oil, and that was all of it.
Nine seconds. I counted them the way I count everything, in the back of my head, against my will.
Nine seconds to say the true thing in front of the whole village to the most charming man in it, and it cost him nothing, because he was leaving on Tuesday, he had said so at the door with his coat on, the ticket was bought, the wife had rung twice already and he had stepped into the yard to take it.
And Valerio — this is the part I want you to understand, because if you do not understand this part you will think it was a fight and it was not a fight, nothing in this village is ever a fight — Valerio was not embarrassed.
He did not color, he did not stiffen, he took the correction the way the ground takes rain, all the way in, no puddle, and he laughed, warmly, at himself, and said something about how the ones who lived it always kept the better version, and how lucky we were to have it from the source, and he poured for Hector, and the table stayed warm, the table did not so much as dip, the whole loveliness of it rolled on over the nine seconds like water over a stone it did not know was there.
Nobody at that table thought anything had happened.
Nella was telling somebody they had the year of something else wrong.
Fatou was laughing. Somebody's dog — Palla, who is nobody's dog and eats at every house and had come to my yard because there was a table in it — put her head on my knee under the boards, and I fed her the thing I was not eating.
I was not eating because I had understood something and it had taken my appetite, which never happens, ask anyone.
The fork was in my hand and I was turning it and not lifting it, and there was wine at my elbow I was not drinking, and I had the whole loud warm yard in front of me and could not put a single thing of mine into the middle of it, I who put something into every silence, I who cannot walk past a quiet and leave it alone.
Down the far end somebody was losing an argument about the boar, loudly and happily, and a plate went round, and the boy was back up on the low wall daring the fall again, and a man two seats down was telling me the wine was good, was it mine, and I said yes, it was mine, and it was not, and none of it needed me to be there for it to be lovely.
I had thought, for three months, that the reason I did not speak was that I was not brave.
That Hector had a thing I did not have, some flat cold nerve, and that if I only found it I would find my voice too.
And it was not that. I watched him reach past the correction to the oil and I saw it plain: it was not courage.
Courage was not the ingredient. He could say it because he had nothing at this table he was afraid to lose.
He did not want the seat. He did not want the village to walk him to the good end, he did not lie awake wanting these people to decide he was one of them, he was going home on Tuesday to a house full of daughters and he owed this place nothing and it could give him nothing and so his mouth was free.
And mine was not. My mouth was the most expensive thing I owned.
I had spent three months not-speaking and I had told myself it was cowardice, because cowardice, at least, you can fix — but it was not cowardice.
It was that I had put money down on this table, the way I put money down on everything, and a man does not raise his voice against the thing he has bought.
It had seemed, at the time, at every single moment along the way, like the friendly thing to do.
Hector caught me not eating. He did not make anything of it.
He looked at the house behind me, the dark bulk of it, the roof half on and half sheeted, the way you look at a bus timetable in a language you do not read, and he looked back at me, and there was nothing in his face — no ache, no old grief that I could find in it, none of the things a story would have put there — he was a man at the end of a good meal in a place his people had left the year he was born, and he felt, as far as I could see, about it, nothing at all.
He would sign on Tuesday. He had told me he would sign.
The thing I wanted with my whole body, the two hundred years, the family that was from somewhere — he had it, he actually had it, it was his, and it weighed on him about as much as the coat he had not bothered to take off, and he would put his name to a paper and hand it away for the second time and go home and not think about it on the plane.
"It's a good house," he said, to be kind, because I was still not eating and he was, whatever else he was, a kind man. "It was always a good house. Somebody should have it."
I said something. I do not remember what. I hosted at him, probably, offered him something, filled the silence with the reflex I fill every silence with, and he let me, and drank his wine.
Then he looked at me across the ruin of the plates, in our Spanish, the only Spanish at that table, the two of us the only ones in the whole warm yard who could not follow a word the village said and did not have to, and there was something almost like fondness in it, one countryman of nowhere to another, and he said the simplest thing anybody had said to me since August, and it went in like a nail.
"You bought it," Hector said, pleased for me, and I could not think of one thing to say back.