CHAPTER 37
THE CROWN STONES
Malick
The oratorio is a small room with a whitewashed inside and half its roof still on it, and it has not been a chapel since before I was born.
It is a store now, and it has been a store since the family went, and it will be a store or a room or whatever the American decides, and the only thing in it that ever mattered to me is the door arch, because a door arch is the one place in a building where the wall admits it is made of pieces.
The rest of a wall lies to you. It stands there looking solid and it is a stack of separate stones agreeing to press on each other, and the arch is the same lie made honest, a curve of wedges leaning inward that would all fall down at once if you took one out, which is why you never take one out, which is why for ten weeks I had two of them out.
The two stones had been on the ground since the twenty-third of August, numbered on the underside in pencil, one and two, left and right, under a sheet against the oratorio wall while the arch stood on props above the empty place they came out of.
Ten weeks. Long time for a stone to be out of the sky it was cut for.
I took the sheet off them in the cold and they were the colour they had always been, the pale local rock the whole valley is made of, the same stone I burn to get my lime.
Nobody up here ever says that. You dig the hill, you burn the hill, you put the hill back on the hill.
That is the whole trade and it is not a poem.
It was cold enough that morning that the bedding wanted watching.
Lime and frost do not agree. You do not set a stone into a joint that is going to freeze on you the first night, and I had checked the sky three days running, which is a thing I do and today's weather is never the weather I check.
Three days out it was dry and low and no frost in it.
So: today. You take the window the year gives you and you do not argue with it, because the year is the only thing on this job I have never once been able to talk to.
Ibu held the ladder. He held it the way an eighteen-year-old holds a thing he has been told to hold, one hand, phone in the other, weight on one hip, and it was enough, because a man on a two-metre ladder setting a stone does not fall, he steps down.
"Which one," he said.
"One. The left."
I mixed the bedding thin and I buttered the seat and I checked the number twice, one to the left, because a stone put back the wrong way round is a stone that never sits, it rocks the rest of your life and you never find why.
Then it was the slow part, and the slow part is the whole part.
You do not drop a crown stone in. You bring it up on the packing, on folded lead and hardwood slips, and you ease it, and you tap, and you look, and you take a slip out, and you tap, and you look, until the joint on both sides closes to a black line and the stone stops being a stone you are holding and becomes a stone the arch is holding.
The arch has to take it. You cannot make it take it.
You put it where it goes and you get out of the way and the shape does the rest, the way a shape has done the rest since 1690.
It took the first one in about fifty minutes.
It sat sweet. I put my eye to the joint from below and the black line ran even from springing to crown, no daylight, no rock, and I came down the ladder and moved it two rungs and went back up to look at the seat for the second one, and the seat was clean, and I wetted it, and Ibu passed me the stone the way you pass a man a stone, both hands, close to the body, and I did not have to tell him that part because I had told him that part in June and once was enough for the hands even if it is never enough for the head.
The second, near two hours, because the second is the one that locks and the second is the one that will not lie to you.
It went up on the packing and it rocked.
A hair. You feel it before you see it, a live thing under the mallet where a dead thing should be, and you do not force a rocking stone, you find the air it is riding and you take it out.
I pulled a lead slip the width of a nail and it still rocked.
I pulled another and it did not, and then it was worse, then it was hungry, the joint gone open on one side and wanting more than I would give it, and I built the side back up in thin leaves, tap and look, tap and look, my shoulder telling me by then that it had been overhead too long, the way it does after an hour, the ache that does not go past a point and does not need to, because past that point you stop for the day whether the stone is in or not.
It was not going to be a two-day stone. I felt the year in the cold and gave the shoulder to it.
"Is it heavy," Ibu said, halfway through the two hours, bored down to the bone.
"No."
"Then why is it slow."
So I told him about the packing. I told him how a joint that looks shut can be shut on air, and how you find it in the spring when the frost gets into the air you left and lifts your stone a millimetre and then the millimetre is a crack and the crack is a year.
I told him you tap and you do not push, because a man who pushes a voussoir is a man telling a wall it is wrong.
"You could just cement it," he said, to needle me, because he knows.
"You could."
"Then it's done in ten minutes and it looks the same."
"For nine years," I said. "Then it looks like Nella's."
He almost smiled. He said none of it back that mattered. He looked at his phone. He held the ladder. And I stood up there over him packing a stone into a hole and saying more words in a row than I say in a week, working my mouth around how you tell a hard thing slowly and get it to sit.
His name was on the box. My maestro's. The box of slips and slate and the little steel float lived on the bench in the bottega with his name still inked on the lid where he wrote it forty years ago, and there is no box in that room with my name on it, and I set his stones back into his valley's arch with his tools. The wall stands.
The second stone closed. I felt it go — not heard it, felt it up the mallet handle, the give ending, the whole arch settling the last hair onto itself and holding.
I put a flat hand on the finished ring of it, on the cold, and I read it the only way I know how, which is with my palm, and it was true all the way round.
Ten weeks in the dirt and it went home like it never left.
"That it," Ibu said.
"That's it."
He looked at the arch. It looked like an arch.
It had looked like an arch yesterday with a prop under it and it looked like an arch now with nothing under it and there was no way to see the difference and no way to photograph it and nothing to clap for, and that is what the work is, and my nephew will spend his whole life somewhere else and never once do a thing that leaves that little to look at, and I could not decide, on the ladder, whether I wanted that for him or against him.
We struck the last prop before noon. You knock the wedge at the foot and the timber comes loose in your hands and for a breath the arch is standing on nothing but itself and the morning, and you have handed a three-hundred-year-old thing its own weight back and asked it to hold, and it holds, because it always held.
Ibu carried the prop out to the van without being told and did not know he had just watched anything.
I chalked nothing. Up the door frame the American's chalk said eleven in his square hand, eleven days, and I did not do anything about it, and the number only ever goes one way.
* * *
My mother's kitchen holds too much heat by half.
It always has. She cooks for thirty when there are four of us and the windows run with it and you take your coat off inside the door or you cook in it yourself.
That evening it was the four of us, her and me and the American and the boy, and the food that is hers and needs telling to no one, and the boy had his phone on the table by his plate, and the dog came in when the door came open and went under, and went to my leg, the way she does, and put her chin on my boot, the way she does.
He was talking. He is always talking. He was pricing the winter — what the sheeting cost, what the timber would keep at, whether the man with the paranco would come cheaper if we booked the spring now — filling the kitchen the way he fills every quiet, and my mother answered the half of it worth answering and let the rest go by, and I ate, and I did not talk, because I had decided in the morning on a ladder what I was going to do tonight and I do not float a thing I have decided.
My mother has wanted me off that house since the day the American got it.
She thinks it is a bad year of my life with a roof half on it.
She is not soft about it and she has never once pretended to be, and tonight, while he priced the paranco, she said across him, to me, in the way she says things, that a man who keeps building other people's houses will die in a rented one, and that I should let it go before the frost and take work in the city where they pay on time.
She was not being cruel. She was being right, which with her is the same face.
He went quiet at that, the American, because he understood one word in three but he understood the shape, the way you understand a wall is angry at you before you can say why.
"More," he said to me, meaning the plate, already up, already reaching, because a silence to him is a hole and he cannot leave a hole.
"No. Sit down, Mattia," I said. "Eat your own."
He sat. My mother looked at me a moment, because there was something in how I said it she did not have a use for yet, and then she let it go by like the rest, and the dog shifted her chin on my boot and sighed.
I have said hard things out loud my whole life.
I said the invoice out loud with the invoice in my hand.
I have told this man who he was to his face and been wrong about it and not taken it back for months.
But my hands did not know where to be. That was new.
I have never in a working day not known what my hands were for, and I sat at my mother's table with them flat on my own knees under the wood, empty.
The boy was on his phone, thumb going, the little light on his chin.
The window over the sink ran with the heat and you could not see the yard through it, only the dark and the lamp doubled in the wet glass.
She had cooked for far more of us than were there, the way she does, and half of it would go out cold to somebody's door tomorrow, the way it does.
And I knew, sitting in all that heat with my hands empty, that whatever a man says at this table does not stay at this table.
It goes to the shop. It goes down the road.
Nella would have it by Thursday and it would be wrong by the sagra and it would still be mine, said in the open, in a place that keeps what you put in it.
A thing you cannot take back is a thing that can be handed round without you, forever, and I sat there and chose it on purpose.
I waited for the boy to leave a hole in the football, and then I did not use the hole to say something small, the way you are supposed to.
I put my knife down. My mother looked up.
And I said it standing, because sitting I would have had somewhere to put the trouble, and I did not want anywhere to put it.
"I do everything slowly. Lime takes a year to set and stone takes longer and I have never once in my life been able to want a thing fast. So hear the size of it.
I stopped being able to walk past that house in September, and it was not the house I was stopping for.
I am saying it first, out loud, sober, at my mother's table — because I am the one who still lives here afterward, and I would rather be the man who said it than the man who got offered it.
"My father pointed sixty metres of that wall in 1989.
It is still standing, and there is no paper anywhere in this country with his name on it, and he never once got to be a man who could ask for a thing out loud.
I am not inheriting that. I want the wall.
I want the work. I want you in the room while I do it, for years, and I want to be able to say so here, at this table, with the lights on.
Don't give me anything, Matias. Just stop leaving the room.
" And Nella's plate was on the table, and nobody had seen her put it there.