CHAPTER 35
THE WEATHER
Malick
The valley had put its mist down in the night, and I came out into the yard in the dark and stood above it.
It lay in the Valnerina the way milk lies in a pan, flat and full, with the far ridges standing up out of it black and small, and I was looking down on cloud the way you do maybe forty mornings of a year up here, and every one of those mornings means the same thing and there is no arguing with it.
The turn had come. It comes fast when it comes.
Two nights ago I had seen my own breath for the first time going out to the pit, and I had said nothing about it, because a man does not announce the weather to himself, he only reads it, and then he does what the reading tells him.
So I did the weather first, before the fire, before anything, the way my maestro did it and the way his did, standing still in the cold with my hands in my coat and letting the shape of the day come up off the ground and tell me what it wanted.
It did not want to burn off. I have watched enough of these to know the mist that lifts by ten from the mist that sits, and this one sat, and it would sit tomorrow, and the north face of the house was going to lose the sun this month and not get it back till February.
I went to the wall. The vault stood behind me in the dark, a heavier black against the black, holding itself up the way it had done since the props came out, and the surviving half of the roof sat over it still on its own timbers, still sound, and the gone half lifted and settled under its sheet when the air moved.
I did not turn to check any of it. I knew it stood.
What I wanted was the last lift laid on the north face, the fresh course, and I put the back of my hand against it, not the palm — the palm has forty years on it and cannot feel a thing under a certain cold — and the back of my hand told me what I already knew.
Green. Not blown, not skinned, but young, a week of damp in it yet before it would take a frost and laugh at it.
And then I did the arithmetic, standing there, the way I have done it every October of my life.
A lift a day if the day is dry. A finger's depth of cure a month, from the face inward, slow, the wall drinking the year down into itself.
A week of wet before it is hard enough to keep.
And frost, which does not wait for a wall to be ready, which comes down one night with no warning, and it does not pause, and it does not resume, and you do not get the week back.
I know to the day what can still go up on that wall and what cannot.
I did not say the answer out loud. There was no one to say it to, and the number is not a thing you speak; it is a thing you organise around.
My maestro had a way of putting the end of a year that I have never improved on and still use as if it were mine.
A season does not close because you are ready, he said; it closes because the cold comes to close it, and the only choice a man gets is whether it finds his work covered or open.
He said it in the yard with a spade in his hand and he was not being wise, he was telling me to bank the pit, and I banked it, and he watched me do it and said nothing, which was how he said it was right.
He has been dead eleven years and the sentence is as current in my mouth as the weather.
I put my hand back in my coat and went in to light the fire.
* * *
The parere came back from the Soprintendenza. It came back favourable.
I want to be plain about it, because it is not a small thing and I will not pretend it is.
The paper we had waited on since the summer, the one with the last twenty days of the file still sitting in it, came back from the desk in the city and it said yes.
It could not slip. There is a term on that paper, and the term is the kind that runs out whether anyone is watching it or not, and it ran out clean and it landed where it was always going to land, and there is nobody to thank for that and nobody to blame.
And it changed nothing that could be done this year.
Because the twenty days it started run out into a month where lime will not cure, and a roof you cannot bed on a wall you cannot lay is a roof that waits for spring, and everyone who needed the paper to come needed it to come in September, not now.
I stood in the yard with it while the crew came up through the mist, and I looked at the good news in my hand, and the good news was a stone.
The paper was never the thing. The thing was the calendar, and the calendar had been eaten in July, quietly, by a man who never once said no to any of it, who put nothing in writing and raised his voice to no one, who simply did not do the small thing that would have moved us forward, week after week, until the weeks were gone.
There is a word in the trade for a mortar that will not take a fresh course on top of it, that has gone off wrong in the mixing and sits there sweet and useless and will bond to nothing you lay: it is hungry.
It looks like everything is fine. Nothing keys to it.
You cannot argue with a hungry joint. You cannot integrate it or put it on an agenda or charm it.
You strip it and you eat the season, and the man who mixed it is not on the wall with you when you do.
I did not say any of that either.
I found the carpenter by the door and we walked the season out loud instead, which is the only useful thing a man can do with a lost autumn.
What gets sheeted and how tight. When the pit gets covered.
Which lifts on the south face I could steal in the last dry days before it turned, and which I would leave, because a lift you cannot cure is a lie you are telling the wall.
He is a good man and he heard all of it and did not make me say the part underneath, which is that the roof was not going on.
We did not put that in words. We put timber over things instead.
The crew felt it before I told them. That is the way of a crew — they stop asking a thing about a week before you say it, the questions just go, and one day nobody has asked about the roof and nobody decided not to, and that is how you know they know.
The youngest one, who had asked me every Monday since August when the tiles were coming, did not ask, and looked at the sky instead, and got the mortarboard, and I let him have the not-asking, because there is a kindness in not making a man say a thing he has already understood.
Fatou came up midmorning with bread nobody had asked for and stood at the arch where the sun would have been and was not, and watched me strip a hungry patch off the south return, and she has watched me work since I was a boy and she does not miss much.
"You are angry," she said. Not a question. She says the true thing and then waits to be told it is not true, which it usually is.
"Frost takes a green mortar and turns it to sand," I said.
"It does not care whose it is or how it was mixed or who was late.
It comes down in the night and in the morning the wall is a beach.
" I set the chisel and struck it and the bad course came away in a plate, sweet-smelling and useless, exactly as I had said it would. "That is what frost does."
She looked at me a while. She did not mishear it.
That is the thing about my mother — she has never once needed a sentence explained to her that was already exact — and she did not put the other word to it, the one for the man, and neither did I, and she took her bread over to the crew and told the youngest one he was too thin, and that was the end of that.
* * *
The stove in the bottega I lit for the first time that evening.
There is a first fire every year and you know it when you light it, the flue cold and slow and the smoke sulking at the door before it remembers where up is, and then it draws, and the room changes, and the year has a corner in it that is warm now and will stay warm till March.
The whole village had lit theirs the same night, every chimney at once the way it always is, the first fires, and by six you could not walk the lane without the whole valley smelling of woodsmoke, oak and olive and somebody's green pine that they should know better than to burn, all of it hanging in the cold under the mist that had not gone.
The folder was on the bench where it lives.
I opened it, not to read it — I know what is in it — but the way you check a thing is still where you left it.
The certificates of regolare esecuzione, signed and countersigned.
The photographs of every phase with a scale bar laid in the frame, dated on the back in my own hand, the north face before and the north face after, the vault propped and the vault struck.
It is the only thing I own that speaks for me in a room I am not standing in.
A wall cannot come to the city and argue.
A wall stays on its hill. But the folder goes, and the folder says: this was done, and it was done right, and here is the man who did it — and one day it will have to say that to a desk that has never seen my hands.
Matias came by while the fire was still finding its draw.
He had the gourd with him, the way he does now, and he was talking, which is the sound he makes the way the stove makes its sound, about the carpenter and what he owed him and whether the man would take a dinner instead of the last of the cash and did I think that was an insult or a kindness, in that country you never knew, and here he supposed it was — and in the middle of the sentence, his own sentence, he got up and went out to the yard with the gourd to do the thing he does at the frame, the chalk, the count, and left the clause hanging in the warm room behind him.
I did not follow him. I did not say anything. I put a fresh split on the fire and watched it catch.
The lime pit I had not covered. It was still open under its planks with the water lying black on the putty, and covering a pit before the freeze is a twenty-minute job with a spade and some old boards.
I had not done it that morning and I did not do it that evening.
I have covered a pit every autumn since I was tall enough to hold the spade, and I left it open anyway.
I do not know why. No one asked me. I did not have the answer to give them if they had, and I stood over the black water a while with the boards in reach and did not lift them.
I went and read the gauges instead, in the cold, with a pencil that my fingers did not want to hold, and put the day's date on the plastic beside the crack at the crown, and the number was the number it had been.
That was something. That, at least, was not moving.
Nella came to the bottega door to tell me the state of the world, which she does when a fire is lit somewhere she can see it, and she stood in the warm and did not sit and delivered the whole of it in one breath — the road, which the comune would not mend and which had swallowed her cousin's suspension, and the boar, which had been in the orto again and had the government's protection while an honest woman's onions had none, and the internet, which was worse than last year and last year was worse than the year before, and the young people, who all left, and the Pro Loco, which was run by fools who were not her, and the price of everything, and the mist, which she took personally — all of it to a man who was banking a stove and saying nothing, because none of it wanted an answer, it wanted a room with heat in it and a person in the room, and I was that.
Palla was not in the yard that evening. She had gone off down the lane somewhere warmer, into somebody's kitchen that was not mine, and become somebody's floor and nobody's dog for the night, the way she does when the cold comes on hard.
She keeps to whichever door has bread behind it and a warm stone by the stove, and she owes no one for it and no one minds, and before long she would drift back to my mixer with her chin on my boot as if she had never once been gone.
When they had all gone I stood at the door with the stove ticking behind me and the woodsmoke lying over the whole village and the mist over that, and Matias's chalk out on the frame in the dark with one more number scratched into it than there had been that morning.
The forecast came in on the little screen of the phone, cold nights and no sun in the whole of it, and I did the arithmetic in my head, and I did not say the answer out loud.