CHAPTER 42
ZERO
Matias
The last number I ever chalked on that door frame was a zero, low on the jamb at the height my hand had found for it back in August without my telling it to, and I did not wipe the smear of yesterday off first, so the one sat there under it, faint and lifting, and the zero sat over the one, and I stood back and looked at the two of them the way you look at a bill you have finally settled, and for the first time in the ninety days I had been doing it there was nobody in the yard behind me to watch me do it.
I capped the chalk. It went back in the jacket pocket it had ridden in since the first week.
And then, because there was nothing to count down to anymore and because everybody else in the comune was already gone, I went down the hill to the frantoio.
I had thought — I don't know what I had thought.
Baskets, maybe. A man on a ladder in good light dropping olives one at a time into a wicker thing while somebody laughed.
It was a queue. It was crates, not sacks, slatted and shallow so the air could get up through the fruit, stacked four high the length of the yard with a chalked number on the side of each stack, and the combs had been whining on their poles up in the trees since before it was light, and it was cold, and it was wet, and it was dark under the roof where the press was, and nobody's hands were working right, and it was, taken all together, the least beautiful beautiful thing I had seen since I got here.
You could not skip it. That was the thing I understood standing in it with my coat done up to the throat: you could not skip it and you could not — and here is where my own head betrayed me — you could not buy your way up it.
The order was who had come first. Your fruit went on the scale and became a lot, and the lot got a number, and it got milled as your lot, alone, and what came out the far end was your oil and not somebody else's, and there was no arrangement anywhere in the building by which it could have been otherwise.
I took my crates off the little three-wheeler.
My hectare and a bit of trees that nobody had picked in fifty-eight years gave up, when it was weighed and pressed and poured off and the number read out, something in the region of twenty litres, which is a joke, which is barely a joke, and I was so happy about it I had to look at my boots.
The man at the spout was kind about it. He said the old trees always surprised you, give them a year of somebody minding them and you'd see, and he meant it, and it was the single worst thing that happened to me that whole week, and neither of us said so, and how could we have, when he was being nice.
For a week after that the whole village smelled of it.
Green, and bitter, and cut grass, and under all of it something like a bruise, hanging over the roofs and coming in the window at night.
You tasted it standing up, on bread, at eleven o'clock with your coat still on, and it caught you at the back of the throat and made you cough, and the cough was the good sign, and the men counted each other's coughs across the room and kept score, and that was the entire quality assessment, and it was the funniest thing in the year.
* * *
The paper came on the eleventh.
It came the way everything comes here, on the last lawful day it could have come and not one morning sooner, at the very back end of a file that had started around the first of May in the name of people who had never been the ones who wanted it, filed by a man who intended to keep being here whatever the file said — and it said yes.
It had taken until the eleventh of November to say a word that is three letters long in my language and I could not read it in his.
Malick read it. He stood in the doorway with it held out at the arm's length he holds a thing at when he has left the glasses at the bench, and he read it the way he reads all paper, flat, like it weighed something, and then he told me what it said in about six words, which was more or less: it says yes, and it means spring.
The roof was not going on this year. It was San Martino, and nobody was moving out of anything.
I did not ask what it had cost, or what the yes was worth, or who I was supposed to thank for it.
I put it on the table. I put the kettle on instead, and that was the whole of it.
* * *
The sagra was under a marquee in the piazza, trestles end to end with paper down the middle of them, plastic chairs, and the whole thing smelling of the new oil over the top of woodsmoke and the sweet blue reek of chestnuts going black in the drum.
There was a woman at the ticket window with a cash box and a printed pad and a face that had done this for forty years and would do it for forty more.
The grill was men. It is always men, and they never do the washing-up, and the women say so every single year, loudly, at volume, to the whole marquee, and nothing whatever changes, and I have come to understand that the saying and the not-changing are both part of it and neither is going anywhere.
Somebody put me on plates. Not the cash box — I noticed I was not put on the cash box, and I noticed too that I could not have told you what it meant to be put on plates instead, only that it was somewhere warmer than the sink out the back and somewhere colder than the box with the money in it, and that nobody explained the difference to me and nobody ever was going to.
So I carried plates. I carried plates from the hatch to the long tables and I was, God help me, happy, hosting a thing that was not mine, in a tent twenty other people had put up, at a job I had not chosen and did not understand, and I did not price one single thing all night.
Dario was there. He was civil to me, and a nod is the whole of what he owed anybody after the year he'd had, and we left it at the nod, and nothing between us was mended and nothing needed to pretend to be.
Nella held court by the chestnut drum and did not, at any point, and would not, ever, to her grave, admit that Fatou's torta al testo off the hot stone was better than her own, though the plate of Fatou's went and the plate of hers came back half full, which is an argument that does not require anyone to speak.
Fatou was insufferable about the mate. She had a knot of them around her passing the gourd, topping it from a thermos, and she caught my eye over the top of it with a look of such flat triumph — she who had taken to the thing in a single afternoon back in August while the rest of them wrinkled their noses — that I had to turn away and carry more plates.
It was mine, the gourd. Or it had been. I had taken it out of the top of a suitcase on the second morning I was here, the fourteenth of August, wrapped in a sock so the bombilla wouldn't rattle, the one thing in all that luggage that had come from the life I had actually lived, and I had set it on the counter of a house I owned and did not know, and felt, for about a minute, at home in the only way I knew how to feel it, which is with an object from before.
And now it was on somebody else's table across a marquee, in somebody else's hands, being topped from a thermos by a woman who had made it hers in an afternoon, and it had been so long since anyone here had asked me a single thing about it — where it was from, what it was, how you were supposed to drink it — that I had stopped, some weeks back, remembering to notice that I had once had to explain it.
It was passed to a man I didn't know and he drank from it like he was born to it. Nobody looked at me. I carried plates.
They read the accounts out at some point, standing on a chair, and somebody objected to the same forty euro that gets objected to every year, and the tombola came round and the top prize was a ham and a widow three tables down won it and accepted it like a woman who had expected nothing else.
The band started at ten. Ballo liscio, and the ones who got up to dance it were seventy and the ones who stood at the edge and watched were forty, and I was among the watchers with a tray on my hip.
And Valerio came.
He came late and easy, in a good coat, and a place opened at the full end of the table without anyone appearing to decide it, and he was gracious, and he was lovely, and at one point Palla heaved herself up off the marquee floor and went and put her heavy old head on his knee, and he bent down without a word to anybody and scratched the exact spot behind her ear that she cannot reach, with no one watching him do it and nothing on earth to be gained by it, and that was the last I ever saw of him.
He had not learned a thing. He was not going to.
The calls would just, over a winter, over a year, stop being returned, quietly, by everybody at once and nobody in particular, and no one in that tent would ever say a sentence about why, and I carried my plates, and the frantoio smell sat over the whole of it, and somewhere in there the woman with the pad wanted my name for the rota and I gave it to her, my own name, the one off the deeds, and she said it back to me the right way, the double letter in the middle doing a small hard thing my mouth has never once made it do, and she laughed, kindly, and I said it again and got it wrong again, and she laughed again, and I will get it wrong for the rest of my life, and it is funny, and it is not.
* * *
The house at the end of the day had the last of the light coming flat across the ground floor, and the props were out of it now, and the vault stood struck and sheeted for the winter, and the half of the roof that was still on was still on and the half that was gone was under its own sheet with the water running off it, and it was cold inside the way a building is cold that nobody has ever thought to heat, the green bite of the new oil come in on his own coat from the marquee and gone thin against the cold stone, a smell already out of its own week.
Malick had a folder open on the one bench that was clear.
It was a folder, with photographs in it, and a little scale bar laid in the corner of each one, and a certificate that a full restauratore had signed at the top and he had signed under, not as the man who put his name to the wall but as the man the wall could be proved by — the register had asked him, one more time, for proof, and this time the proof was going in a folder and the register was going to believe it.
The decree that would say how much of it was enough had still not been written.
Nobody could tell him what would be enough.
He closed the folder, and he went to the wall.
Palla's prints were still in the intonaco where she had walked it in August, a metre of them, set hard and pale, a whole season of weather on them and not one of them moved. My two metres of cement had come off the same week I laid it.
Ibu was there because somebody had put a key in his hand and a hawk in the other and given him a metre of low wall to point, to keep him out from underfoot, and he was doing it the way an eighteen-year-old does a thing he does not want to do and would rather be anywhere else than doing — fast, careless, the mortar proud in some joints and starved in others, his phone face-up on the stone beside him, half his attention out the door where the rest of his night was.
He finished the metre and stood back and looked at it and said, to nobody, to the room, that it was only a wall, that it didn't have to be a painting, that it would hold.
He said it the way you say a thing you have already decided somebody is about to take off you.
And he waited for it. You could see him wait — braced for the correction, for the hawk taken out of his hand, for his uncle's flat voice naming every bad joint in the run, the nineteenth-century man doing his nineteenth-century thing.
Malick looked at it a long moment.
And he left it.
Ibu did not know what to do with that. He stood there with the trowel loose in his hand and a thing coming up in his face, and the light went down another notch across the floor, and none of us said anything. Ibu pointed a metre of wall, badly, and Malick looked at it a long moment and left it.