CHAPTER 41
NOBODY'S YET
Malick
The season was gone and the house had known it before either of us said so.
You feel it in a building the way you feel it in your own hands: the cold comes up out of the floor and not down from the roof, and nothing you do after that matters until spring.
The vault was struck. The props were out of the ground floor and stacked along the wall where the light used to come in.
Half the roof was still on, the old half, the half that was already there, and the gone half lay flat under its sheet in the yard, timber that was true and would stay true, waiting.
I had put a sheet over the vault myself.
It would hold. That was not in question.
Nothing was in question. That was the strange part.
Matias was at the far end of the room doing what he did, which was nothing, which he was very bad at.
He had picked up a prop and set it down.
He had looked out the window that had no glass in it yet and would not this year.
There was a lamp on the floor on an extension lead, a work lamp, and it made the stone yellow and threw his shadow long across the intonaco where the dog's prints were, and neither of us looked at that either.
Outside it was black already and it was not seven o'clock.
The chalk on the door frame said 2.
He had written it that morning, the way he wrote it every morning, and I had watched him do it the way I watched him do it every morning, and neither of us said the number out loud.
I count in seasons. I have never once said a number of days.
But I knew what the two meant, and I knew it had stopped meaning it, because there was nothing on the other side of it anymore to lose.
San Martino would come and the paper would come after it and the paper would say spring, and no lift I made now would cure before the freeze, and there was nothing left to beat.
I did not know, standing in that cold room with my hands empty, what I was supposed to do with an evening that was not against anything.
I looked at my own hands and there was nothing on them.
No lime, no dust, no split in the skin from the day.
I had washed them at some point and forgotten doing it, which I never do, because the day is always a day behind itself and there is always the next wall.
There was no next wall tonight. There was a lamp on the floor and a man at the far end of the room and the specific cold of a house nobody heats, and the two of us in it with nothing to hold and nowhere to be.
He turned around. He had that look he got when a silence had gone on too long for him, when he was about to fill it, and I watched the breath come into him to say a thing, and I said it first.
"Come here," I said.
Not because a wall had failed. Not because the site was open again, it was not.
Not because anyone had left, or was coming, or because the freeze was three days out and the mortar had to go on tonight or lose the year.
None of the reasons I had ever had. I had run out of reasons and I had asked anyway, and the asking was not brave.
It was the least brave thing I had ever said to him.
It was just a thing a man says to another man in a room.
He came.
* * *
He crossed the floor and he was not careful about it.
That was the thing about him, the thing the village misread from the first week, the ease he carried in the body like it cost nothing, like nobody had ever charged him for the way he moved through a room.
He put his hands on me before he got the last step done, one at my jaw and one flat on my chest, and he kissed me the way he did everything, all at once, too much, no economy in it anywhere.
His mouth was warm. The room was not. I felt the cold of the stone at my back through my shirt and the heat of his hands through the front and the two of them meeting somewhere in the middle of me, and I stopped keeping account of anything.
I kept waiting for the thing that would need explaining.
There is always a thing. I have carried papers my whole life for the moment a man asks me to prove I am what I say I am, and the moment always comes, and I have always had the paper.
I stood there with his mouth on mine and I waited for it, the pause, the question, the small silence where I would have to give an account of myself, and it did not come, and I did not know what to do with the space where it should have been.
"Hey," he said, against my mouth. "Where'd you go."
"Nowhere," I said. Which was true, and which was the whole of it, and he could not have known that.
We got the shirts off between us and it was clumsy and it was cold and neither of us cared.
He took his hands off me only to pull his shirt over his head and I looked at him.
That is the thing I let myself do, that I do not let myself do in the daylight with the village at the window: I looked at him.
The lamp came up under his jaw and the line of his throat and I watched him breathe.
His chest went and came. His mouth was open a little.
I put my hand on him and my hand is not a soft thing, the lime has been in it for twenty years and the nails do not come clean and there is a burn on the inside of the left arm that will be there when I am buried, and he took the wrist of that hand and turned it and put his mouth on the burn, on the old lime scar, without being told to, without a word about it, and it undid something in me that I could not have named and did not try to.
"Bed," I said.
We went. There was a bed in the front room, brought in weeks ago, made up against the cold with too many blankets because the house did not hold heat and would not until there was glass in the windows and a roof over all of it and neither of those things this year.
The lamp stayed on. I want to be clear about the lamp.
It stayed on and I left it on and I did not turn my back to it and I did not put my face in the dark.
I lay down and I pulled him down onto me and the whole weight of him came, and I let it.
I let it. That was the anchor and I did not have a word for it.
Every table in this village would finish a sentence about me if it saw this.
Every table was out there in the black with its lights on.
None of that had gone anywhere. It never goes anywhere.
It was as true tonight as it had ever been.
And I had asked him to come here anyway, and I was lying under the weight of him with the light on.
There was no after in the room. There was only him, breathing into my neck, and the cold, and the lamp.
He got his mouth on my throat and worked down.
I felt the scrape of the day on his jaw against my chest, and lower, his shoulders under my hands, the way his back moved when he went lower still, and I watched what I could see of him, the top of his head, one of his hands spread flat on my hip holding me there, and then I could not watch anything because he took me in his mouth and I put my head back against the wall and made a sound I do not make.
I watched him do it. His shoulders moved easy, the way they always moved, a man who had never once been told to make himself smaller in a room, and I let myself have the sight of it, the muscle shifting in his back under my hand, the working of his jaw, the weight of him settled into this like there was nowhere else the hour had to go.
His hand stayed spread on my hip. His mouth did not hurry.
He looked up at me once, from there, checking, and I did not look away.
He was not proving anything, with my hand in his hair and the wet heat of his mouth on me and the small wrong-shaped English words coming out of both of us because it is the only country we share and neither of us owns it.
He was not performing a skill and I was not being shown a thing and there was no lesson in the room.
He wanted to. That was all. He wanted to and there was no reason under the wanting, no clock, no debt, no first-time nerve, no last-time grief.
Just a man who wanted to, doing it, slow, because there was nowhere either of us had to be.
"Come up here," I said, and he did, and his mouth was slick and I did not care, and I told him what I wanted next, plainly, in the small words, because I say the thing out loud, I have always said the thing out loud, it is the one part of me the village has never been able to take.
He listened, and he said yes, low, the one word, and went for the little bottle on the floor by the lamp and I heard the cap and then his hand, warm from the friction of it, one finger and then the next, unhurried, watching my face the whole time, checking it, and I let him see it.
I did not arrange my face. I let him have the truth of it.
"Okay?" he said.
"Yes," I said. "Yes."
And then he was over me and in me, careful and then not careful, and I got my knees up around him, the knees that have knelt to a wall since I was nineteen and ached every winter since, and none of that mattered, none of the wear of me mattered, he moved and I moved with him and the bed took the both of us and the cold could not get in between us anywhere.
I held onto his shoulders. I watched his face open above me, the mouth, the shut eyes, the breath going ragged, and I said his name once.
Not the one the village gave him. His. He heard it.
He opened his eyes and looked at me and did not stop, and neither of us said anything about the name, because there was nothing to say about it, it was just true, the way the sheet on the vault was true and would hold.
It went on because it could. I want to say that plainly.
Every other time in my life a thing like this has had a wall on the far side of it, a morning, a bill, a season turning, a man about to be gone.
This had nothing on the far side of it. He moved slow and then quick and then slow again, following nothing but the two of us, and when it came it came for both of us close together, him first, his forehead going down onto my shoulder and the sound he made muffled there, and me a breath behind, my hand flat on his back, holding him where he was.
He stayed there. He did not roll off and reach for a thing to say.
He lay on me with his weight going heavy and his heart going hard against my chest and slowing, and I lay under him with the lamp on and my hand on his back, and I waited, still, some old part of me waiting, for the part where I would have to explain myself.
It did not come.
* * *
After a while he got his breath and said, into my neck, "That sheet gonna hold on the vault, you think. With the wind coming."
"It will hold," I said.
"Yeah?"
"I put it on."
He laughed, low, I felt it more than heard it, and he did not move, and neither of us was talking about the sheet.
We were not talking about anything else either.
That is the thing I could not have done a season ago, could not have believed a man could do: lie in the cold in a half-built house, sheeted and propped and open to the sky on one side, and have the talk be about the weather and mean none of it and not need it to close.
It did not close. He did not make it close.
He is a man who fills every silence. He let this one be.
That was the nearest he had ever come to saying a true thing without words.
And I did not fill it either, because I had nothing to file and no one had asked me for anything.
There is a feeling I have had, maybe, for ninety seconds at a time in forty-one years, the length of a wall going right under your hands before the day takes it back.
I do not have a word for it and there is no office that keeps it and no paper that proves you had it.
I had it now and it was not ninety seconds.
It went on. That was the whole of what was strange, that it simply went on, and I lay there in it with the light on and let it, and did not reach for the reason, because there was not one.
The lamp threw our shadow on the far wall, the two of us laid out together, and it was just where the light fell.
Outside the wind came up the valley and found the open side of the house and moved the sheet on the vault, and the sheet held, because I had put it on.
He shifted enough to pull a blanket up over the both of us and settled again, heavy, his hand coming to rest open on my chest, over the burn, over the old scar, the way it had earlier, without a word about it, without meaning anything by it that either of us would ever say.
Neither of us had a reason, and neither of us looked at the door frame, and the number stayed where it was.