CHAPTER 32
SHE PICKS IT UP
Matias
The cold came in the way an invoice comes, not all at once but itemized, a line here and a line there and then the whole of it due before you have decided to pay, and I had felt the first entry that morning when I went out to redo the door frame and the chalk dragged instead of gliding, the way it drags when the wood has taken on damp in the night.
Twenty-four. I wrote it under the twenty-five I had smeared off with my thumb, and then I stood a while in the doorway of a house I owned and could not lay a hand on the inside of, holding a stick of chalk, which the paperwork and the safety notice and the three men on the scaffold all agreed was the one tool in the province I was allowed to hold.
It is a strange thing to own a wall and be told you may not touch it.
I had gotten used to it the way you get used to a shoe that is a half size wrong.
You walk. You just know, all day, that you are walking.
So I did the other thing I was allowed to do, which was to carry the gourd down to the bar in the late afternoon and make mate for people who two months ago would not have known which end of it went in their mouth.
That is not nothing. I want to be clear that it is not nothing.
When a man cannot pour the concrete on his own house and cannot carry the beam and cannot even sweep, because sweeping on a live site is somebody's liability, then the pouring of hot water over yerba in a hollowed gourd and the passing of it, hand to hand, around a table that has gone half-indoors because the season is turning — that becomes the whole of what you have to offer, and you offer it the way a man offers the last thing in his pockets, with both hands, watching the face.
I primed it the way my mother primed it, tilting the yerba up one side of the gourd so the bombilla sat in the dry hollow at the bottom, and I drank the first one myself, because the first one is bitter and green and the host takes the bitter one.
Then I filled it again and passed it to the man on my left, who was the retired carpenter's cousin, and he took it and drank it down and handed the empty back for the next fill without a word, because they had all learned in a week that you do not thank the person for each round, you thank them at the end, and that between the first pour and the last the gourd just goes around, and around.
The bar had pulled two of the outside tables in against the window and left the rest chained out in the cold, and Palla was under our table with her chin on my foot and one eye open for anything that might fall, and the light through the glass was the flat grey light you get when the sun has decided it is done making an effort for the year.
I refilled and passed left. The gourd came back.
I refilled and passed left. I had done this maybe eight times, I was not counting, I have never in my life counted the rounds, when Nella reached across from the good end of the table and took it out of the carpenter's cousin's hand before it got to me.
She had been refusing it since August.
She had refused it on the grounds that it was unhygienic, everyone drinking off the one metal straw, and when I pointed out she ate off a common board of prosciutto with the whole village she refused it on the grounds that it looked bitter, and when I let her smell it she refused it on the grounds that she did not put things in her mouth without knowing what was in them, which is a lie, I have watched that woman eat, and then for a stretch of weeks she refused it on no grounds at all, just a small flat lift of the chin when it came near her, the same lift she gives the priest's sister and the man who reads the water meters, a lift that means the conversation is not going to happen.
And now she took it, and she put the bombilla in her mouth, and she drank.
I did not say anything. There is a version of me from August who would have said something, some warm useless host thing, there she is, welcome, took you long enough, and I have learned that the warm useless host thing is exactly the thing that turns a room.
So I kept my hands where they were, loose on the table, and I watched her the way you watch a smaller pot when the big one has your attention.
She made a face.
It was a specific face and I want to get it right, because it was not disgust, disgust would have been a gift, disgust she could have done at me across the whole table and everyone would have laughed and I would have been in it with them.
It was the face she makes when she tastes something at the sagra that is better than the thing she brought, the same one I had seen her make over Fatou's torta al testo in the yard in the summer, a small tightening at one corner of the mouth, a working of the jaw, a judgment being reached and filed and not read aloud.
She drank the whole fill down to the rattle.
She handed the empty gourd back to me, across the good end of the table, without looking at me, and she said, "It is stronger than it looks, Mattia. "
I did not correct her. I had stopped correcting anyone some weeks back, after the one time I had corrected the whole table at once, and I let the name lie there with everything else she was not going to hand back.
"You have to let the first ones be bitter," I said. "Then it opens."
"Mm," said Nella, which in her mouth is a full sentence and a closed door.
I filled it and I drank the bitter refill myself, to reset it, and I passed it left again, and it went around, and it came to her again, and she took it again without being asked, and she drank, and this time she did not make the face, she just drank it like a woman who had always drunk it, like it had never been a question, and I understood then that there was not going to be a moment.
She had simply decided, on some private ledger I would never be shown, that the mate was hers now, and she would take it, and she would drink it at my table, and the taking of it and the drinking of it committed her to precisely nothing.
* * *
Valerio came in as the light went, and the room did the thing the room always does, which is to be a degree gladder that he is in it.
He came in with the cold on his jacket and a bag of his own olives that he set on the bar for the barman without being asked, because it was near the frantoio time and he was near the frantoio like the weather was near, and he put a hand on the retired carpenter's shoulder and asked after the man's knee, and he had the knee's whole history at his fingertips, which surgery and which year, and he took the empty chair at the good end, the head of it, not because anyone gave it to him but because it was the shape of the room that he should have it, the way water is the shape of the glass.
He is a genuinely lovely man. I have said this before and I will keep saying it because it is the truest and worst thing about him.
He asked me how the roof was coming before he asked anyone anything about themselves, and he asked it with real interest, leaning in, his forearms on the table, a man who wanted to know.
"It is at the Soprintendenza," I said, because that is where it was, and because a fact is a thing I am still allowed to put on a table.
"Ah," he said, and he made a soft sound of sympathy, and he did not say anything about the Soprintendenza, he let the ah do it, the way he lets so much be done by a sound and a face and a small movement of the hand.
Someone poured him a glass of the new red.
The gourd was going around the low end and did not go up to him and he did not reach for it, and I did not offer, because you do not offer the mate up the table, it goes around where it is, and also because I did not want to watch him take it.
The talk went where talk goes in October, to the weather and the olives and whose press and what the yield would be down after the dry summer.
The carpenter said his trees had set poorly and the woman by the window said everyone's had, that it was the July with no rain, and a man I did not know well said the frantoio would open the second week of the month regardless, that it always did, that his grandfather had said you could set a watch by it and be off by a fortnight, and they laughed, and someone filled a glass, and I followed maybe one word in three of it, which is my whole life here, a party heard through a wall — the shape of the pleasure clear and the sense of it gone.
And then the talk went, the way water finds the low place, to the house.
"That poor house," Valerio said, warmly, to the table, shaking his head with a real fondness in it. "Do you know he tried for years to buy that place himself, before you came — years, on and off, the whole business, and look how it worked out."
And that was all of it. Two sentences. He said it the way you'd say a shame about the frost, a shame about the knee, a shame about a thing the weather did, and he picked up his glass and turned to the carpenter to say something about the man's brother's press, and the sentence he had laid on the table just sat there, in the middle of it, next to the olives.
I felt my mouth open.
I want to describe this exactly because it is the only thing I did in the whole hour and I did not do it.
My mouth came open on the first shape of a word, the reflex of it, the host in me that rushes to fill a silence, and I got as far as the breath before the word and no further, because I have sat at a table in this village once already and said the true thing all the way to the end of it, and I know now, in the body, the way you know a stove is hot after the one time, what it costs and who pays it and how long.
So the breath went out without the word on it.
I closed my mouth. I picked up the gourd, which had come back to me empty, and I tilted the kettle over it, and the water went in, and the yerba lifted and settled, and my hands did not shake, which surprised me, my hands were easy, my hands have always been easier than the rest of me, and I passed it left.
Nobody had answered him. Not the carpenter, who liked me, and not the barman, who owed me nothing but was fair, and not the two women by the window who had eaten at my yard in September.
It was not that they agreed with him. It was that there was nothing to answer, he had not made a claim, he had made a kindness, he had been sorry about a house, and you cannot argue with a man being sorry, there is no purchase on it, your fingers slide off.
The talk had already moved to the brother's press.
The sentence dissolved into the warm ordinary evening the way a spoon of something dissolves into water that is already moving, and in a minute it was as if it had not been said, except that I was still holding it, the way you hold a coal somebody has handed you smiling, not able to put it down without making a thing of the putting-down.
The cold came up off the stone floor through the soles of my shoes.
The good end of the table laughed at something.
I was at the other end, which is where I sat now, where I had sat since the summer went out of the room, and I had not decided to sit there and no one had told me to, it was simply where the chair was that was left when I came in, and I had taken it, and taken it the next time, and now it was mine.
Palla got up from my foot and went and put her head on Valerio's knee, because Palla goes to everyone, Palla belongs to the whole street and to no door on it, and Valerio fed her a piece of something off the board without looking down, an easy generous hand, and she stayed at his knee, warm and disloyal and right to be, because she is a dog and she goes where the food is, and she is the only one in the room allowed to.
The gourd came around to Nella and she took it.
She had drunk maybe six rounds by then, more than anyone, she had caught up on thirty chapters of principle in one cold afternoon, and she drank this one slow, both hands around the gourd for the little warmth of it, looking out the grey window at the chained tables in the dark.
I filled the kettle again from the bar's urn. I set it down on the bar.
I asked her, because I am a host and I cannot fully stop, "Do you want the last of it, or do I clean it out?"
She did not look around from the window. She held out one hand for the kettle so she could do the pour herself, in my gourd, at the good end of the table. Nobody said anything, and Nella drank the rest of it, and she still did not ask me to sit down.