CHAPTER 39
THE BAD APOLOGY
Malick
I told my mother I was going to do it before I did it. That is the only way I have ever started anything. You say it out loud — to the room, to the wall, to nobody — I am going to take this off — and the saying is a kind of scaffold, and then you climb it.
She was at the stove and she did not turn around.
"Good," she said. "Go and do it, then, and stop telling the kitchen."
I put my coat on. It is a good coat and it was not going to be enough for the office I was driving to, and I knew that, and I took it anyway, because a man does not dress warm to go and be uncomfortable on purpose.
"You know what this is," she said. To the pan, not to me. "You are going to go and explain it to him. Very clear. Very correct."
"I am going to apologise."
"You are going to explain." She moved the pan off the heat.
"You always were a fool with a handshake, Malick, and you never once got worse at it.
" She said it the way she says everything she has been right about, which is to say without one gram of kindness in it, because she was right about the whole business and the money that is gone, and being right has never once softened her.
It is where I got it. Nobody in this family has ever forgiven anybody for being wrong, and we have all of us stayed.
I went out to the van.
The drive to the comune is nineteen minutes and I had the whole of it, and I used it the way I use the drive to any job: I put the thing in order.
What I had to say to Dario was not complicated.
It had parts and the parts had a sequence, and I laid them out on the road in front of me the way you lay quoins out on the ground before you set a single one, largest to smallest, so that when your hand reaches it already knows what it is reaching for.
The file was going to die on the sismica and it was always going to die on the sismica.
I had known since August. He had told me the file was fine and I had said nothing.
I had corrected him in front of the ingegnere more than once and enjoyed the accuracy of it.
When the thing collapsed on him I had felt, somewhere low and cold, a small clean satisfaction, and I was not going to lie about that part, because the whole reason I was driving nineteen minutes into the cold was that I had decided to stop being a man who left that part out.
It was good. It was in order. Every piece of it was true.
I have never in my life been able to tell when a thing that is true is also the wrong thing to hand a man.
* * *
The office was above the anagrafe, up a stair that smelled of a floor mopped every morning for thirty years and never once dried in time, and Dario's door was open because Dario's door is always open, which is not welcome, it is that he has stopped having the twenty seconds it takes to close it.
There was too much on the desk. There is always too much on the desk.
Folders standing on their spines and folders lying flat and a laptop with the lid half down and, on the filing cabinet behind him, the fax machine, which works.
He had his coat on indoors. The radiator under the window was making the small ticking sound a cold radiator makes when it has decided not to.
"Malick." He did not stand. He was not unfriendly. He has never once been unfriendly to me and that is the part I had not accounted for on the road. "Sit down. You want a coffee, the machine downstairs is broken, I have nothing, I'm sorry."
He apologised to me for the coffee. This is a man whose year I helped end.
I sat. I put my hand flat on the edge of his desk.
I do it without deciding to. It is how I read a thing — a wall, a table, a page, the bonnet of a van — you put the flat of your hand on it and it tells you whether it is sound, and I have done it my whole life and never watched myself do it.
He looked at my hand on his desk. He did not know what it was.
I saw him not know. On his face it looked like a man putting a hand on a thing he owns, and it was the opposite of that, and I did not have the words to tell him so and I would not have used them if I had.
"I came to say something to you," I said.
"All right."
And then I gave it to him. In order. The way I had laid it out on the road.
I told him the file was never going to survive, and why.
I told him I had known it in August, at the house, the first day, with the folder open on the bonnet of his car in the heat.
I told him I had let him say the file was fine and had not corrected him, that day, because it was not my file and it was not my afternoon and I did not owe him the truth and I did not give it to him.
I told him I had corrected him other days, in front of people, and that I had not needed to, most of those times, and had done it anyway.
I told him the last part flat, the way you say a mortar mix, a fact with a cause in it: that when the thing went null and I watched him carry it out of the building, some part of me had been glad, and I had let it be glad, and I had not fought it.
Here is the thing I did not understand until I was inside it.
When I explain how a thing is done, my sentences get long.
I know this about myself. When I am telling a man how the lime slakes, how the heat comes up out of the water grey and violent and then goes still, how you knock it back and knock it back and leave it a season under its own skin — when I explain a mechanism, the sentences run clean and unhurried and I forget to be careful, and it is the only time I am beautiful and I am never beautiful on purpose.
And I heard myself doing it. Explaining the architecture of it.
How this piece connected to that piece. Why the second thing followed the first.
And Dario was standing inside the room I was describing.
I was building him a perfect scale model of the machine that had been running over him for three months, so that he could see it was well-made.
The fax machine went off.
It did the click, and the whine, and then it began to feed a page through itself with the sound of a thing clearing its throat forever, and we both stopped and looked at it.
Both of us. In the middle of the worst sentence I have ever said to anyone, we sat and we waited for the comune's fax machine to finish being the only thing in the building that answers.
It fed the whole page. It cut it. It sat there.
Neither of us laughed. There was nothing in either of us to laugh with.
But it was funny, and I knew it was funny, and I think he knew it was funny, and we let it be funny without moving our faces, because that is the only kind of funny that room has ever had.
"Go on," Dario said.
I did not go on. There was nowhere left to go. I had reached the smallest quoin and set it and the wall was finished and it was the ugliest thing I had ever made.
He was quiet for a moment. He is not a shrill man.
He is thirty-five and he is buried and he takes on more than he can hold because he cannot stand to hand any of it back, and there is no fee coming to him for a single hour of my house, none, the contract is null from the first day and null pays nobody. He was tired.
"You know what you just did," he said.
"I told you the truth."
"You did." He nodded, slow. "You told me the truth very well.
" He pulled the fax page off the tray without looking at it, squared it, put it on a pile.
His hands did it on their own the way my hand had gone flat on his desk on its own.
"I have had a lot of people be angry at me this year, Malick.
People who lost money. People who lost time.
I understand angry. Angry I can put down at night.
" He set the squared page straight with one finger.
"You came here and you were thorough. You did me the courtesy of the whole thing.
And now I know it wasn't chance, and it wasn't the state, and it wasn't the bad luck of a hard file.
There was a shape to it and I was standing in the shape and you could see it the whole time and you watched me not see it.
" He looked up. "That is worse. You understand.
You brought me the worse thing and you brought it neat. "
I did not defend myself. I have thought since about whether I could have, and there was nothing, and I knew there was nothing while I sat there, which is why I said nothing. The not-saying was the only honest thing in the room and it was not enough and I knew that too.
"I'm not asking you to take it," I said.
"Good," he said, "because I'm not going to.
" He put both hands flat on the desk then, mirroring mine without knowing he did it, and I saw that his hands were younger and softer than mine and had signed more paper in ten years than either of us could carry, and it had not saved him one hour of this.
"You do the walls better than anybody left.
Everybody says it. I say it." He let that sit.
"It was never the walls." Not sharp. He said it the way you'd say a date on a form.
"I'll be at the sagra. I'll say good evening to you.
I say good evening to everybody, it costs nothing.
" He turned the laptop lid up with one finger and the screen came grey and full of a list I could not read and did not need to, because the list is always the same list, it is the whole of his life, it is everybody's paper and none of it his.
"That's what I owe you, and I'll pay it, and that's all of it. "
He started to type. Then he stopped, and he did not look at me, and he said the thing.
"That's not an apology," Dario said. "That's you telling me why you did it." And he was right.
* * *
I drove back the long way, which there is no reason to do, and I stopped at the bottega because I did not want to go home and be looked at, and I would have been looked at, because my mother does not go gentle on a man just because the day already went hard on him.
She has never once mistaken my discomfort for payment.
The bottega was cold and it was mine and it smelled of what it always smells of, lime and old wood and the linseed on the bench.
I did not put a light on for a while. On the bench, where it lives, was the folder — my folder, the one my maestro started and I have kept, the certificates and the countersignatures and the dates, every job I have direct-directed with a name above mine that the state accepts, the elenco letter, the stamps.
I stood in my own cold shop, in the last week of a year I could not get the roof onto, and I understood — flatly, without any drama in it, the way you understand a joint is hungry the moment your thumb goes into it — that I had a folder that could argue for me anywhere in this country except the one place it had ever mattered, which was a small warm office where a decent man was owed something I could not file, could not stamp, could not countersign, could not date.
I have every other paper a man can hold and I do not have that one and I never learned to make it, and the truth, which I am apparently only good for when it costs somebody else, is that I did not much want to.
I was cross. That is the whole of what I felt, standing there — not guilt, cross, that this had taken my afternoon in the last week of the year, and I heard myself be cross about it, and I did not like the man I heard, and I did not do anything about him either.
Then it was half past five, and I put my coat back on, and I drove to the house, because yesterday's face on the north wall had gone leather-hard overnight and if I did not close it before the cold got into it properly it would carry the join all winter, and the work is always a day behind itself and the day does not care what else you did with it.
The chalk on the door frame said seven. It was not my hand that wrote it.
I have never in my life said a number of days out loud; I count in the thing that is coming, the frost, the spring, and seven days is not a number to me, it is the near edge of a season I already know the shape of.
But somebody chalks it every morning, and it was there, and I put my flat hand on the stone beside it and read the wall the way I read everything, and the wall was sound, and the wall does not owe anybody an account, and it was the only thing all day that had let me be right about it without it costing another man a thing.
I worked until I could not see the joint. That's not an apology, he had said. That's you telling me why you did it. And he was right.