21. Blank
BLANK
VALERIA
The room comes to me in nine boxes on the third morning, and I make them put it in the ballroom, because it is the only space in this house big enough to lay a man’s whole life out flat and walk around it.
Nobody has used that room since Isabella D’Amato was alive. Lorenzo stands in the doorway while the men carry it in and does not come past the threshold, and I do not have that option, because I am the one who reads.
I am Valeria Rinaldi, and I have been reading other people’s paper for twenty years, and on the twentieth morning of the worst month of my life, I put on a pair of gloves and start on the contents of the room where my husband was made.
At twenty past two I open the last thing, which is a brown accordion folder with a cord tie, and it is the only object out of that entire room that was not on the pegboard and not under the bench.
It was in the drawer.
Under where the pink slip was.
There are eleven forms inside.
Same stock, same three-page counter set, same low rule. All of them are the pink third page. All of them have had the top two thirds cut off cleanly with a blade against a straightedge, so there is no company, no address, no date, no description of anything.
And every single one of them is signed.
G. D’Amato. G. D’Amato. G. D’Amato.
Eleven times, on eleven blank releases, in my husband’s hand, with the open G at the top of every one.
I sit down on the floor of that ballroom in my gloves with eleven pieces of paper in front of me, and I do not call for anybody.
T. wants out. Wife scared. Get him papers and a bus and forty-eight hours.
Picked up. Told F. to handle the rest. Sleep tonight.
I have spent three days holding on to the word thought. He thought he was saving him.
You cannot think you are saving somebody eleven times.
Lorenzo finds me there at some point.
He does not ask what it is. He crouches down at the edge of the paper with his forearms on his knees and reads the top one and then the next one and then he stops reading.
“No,” he says.
“Lorenzo.”
“No. Say the rest of it before you say the end of it.” He does not touch the forms. “How many did you find?”
“Eleven.”
“In a drawer. In his room.”
“Yes.”
“In the same drawer as the one he wanted us to find,” he says, “under the one he wanted us to find, so that we would come back for the drawer after the first one landed.”
“That is not…”
“Valeria, it is beautifully documented.” He looks up at me. “You said that to me in this house seven days ago about a column of initials. You said, that is not carelessness, that is a man showing his work. Say it back to me now.”
I want to hit him.
“Eleven blanks,” I say. “Explain eleven blanks to me. Not the drawer. The paper. A man signs eleven empty forms and hands them to somebody. That is not a trick. That is a relationship.”
He does not have an answer.
“I do not have one,” he says. “I want you to note that I do not have one and that I still do not believe it.”
“Noted.”
“Valeria.”
“I said noted.”
Fabrizio Serra comes at half past three to report on the perimeter, and finds us both on the floor.
“Signora.”
“Fabrizio.”
He looks past me, at four hundred pieces of paper laid out in a grid, at a dead man’s whole working life pinned open on a ballroom floor in the light of his mother’s chandelier.
Something goes across his face. If I had to put a word on it, I would say the word was tired.
“May I come in?”
“You will have to walk around the edges.”
“Yes,” he says.
And then he bends down and takes off his shoes.
He does it without any comment, and he lines them up neatly outside the door with the heels together, and he steps onto the parquet of that room in his socks like a man coming into a church, and I have to look away for a second, and I am not entirely sure why.
He gives Lorenzo the perimeter in about ninety seconds. Then he stands with his hands behind his back at the edge of the grid and looks down at ten years of Giulio.
“Is there anything I can carry?” he says.
“No,” Lorenzo says.
“Then I will look, if the Signora permits, and then I will go.”
I permit it.
He walks the whole length of the room and he does not touch a single page, and at the end of it he stops in front of the eleven.
Nobody has told him what they are.
“Ah,” he says softly.
“You know what those are?”
“I know what a blank release is.” He does not look up. “I have been in this business since I was nine years old, Signora. I have carried a great many things out of a great many buildings.”
“Then say what it means.”
“You will not like it from me.”
“I have not liked anything from anybody in three weeks. Go on.”
“It means somebody trusted somebody,” Fabrizio says.
The room is very quiet.
“That is all it ever means. A man signs eleven empty pages and gives them to another man, and that is not a crime and it is not innocence, it is only trust, and the trouble with trust is that it does not tell you which one of them was right.” He straightens up.
“Your husband was a good man who did some things in the only language he had been taught. It is most of the men in this house.”
“Thank you,” I say.
“Do not thank me for that.”
He goes back along the edge of the room, and at the doorway he stops and puts one hand on the frame, and he says, not to Lorenzo, to me:
“He used to make his G open. At the top. He would not close it.”
I cannot speak.
“I asked him about it once, years ago, and he looked at me as though I was simple, and he said, a closed letter is a finished argument.” Fabrizio smiles a little, at the floor. “Thirty-one years I have known that man, and it is the only genuinely arrogant thing he ever said to me.”
Then he picks up his shoes and carries them away in his hand rather than sit down in that hallway to put them on, and he is gone, and I stand in the middle of my husband’s life with my arms folded and I cry for about four minutes for the first time since Woonsocket.
He stands at the threshold he will not cross with his hands at his sides and he lets me have it, and I love him for it, and I do not say so.
My father calls at four.
He calls every day now, which is new, and he has nothing to say, which is also new. We talk for eleven minutes about the weather and about a man he used to know who has had a knee done.
Then I say, “How are you feeling?”
And there is a pause about a half second too long, and my father says, “Fine. Why.”
“No reason.”
“All right.”
I know about the cardiologist. I have known since last night, when a man I am married to sat on the end of my bed and told me where Fabrizio Serra was on Tuesday, and I did not say anything then and I do not say anything now.
Because my father asked somebody to take him and it was not me.
Because he did not want me to know, and he had a reason. The reason is that in the D’Amato and Rinaldi families a man who is unwell is a man with a price on him, and my father has spent nine years learning exactly what happens to people around me.
I let him lie to me and I say goodbye and I say the thing I have not said to him since the dining room, which is “Ciao, papà,” and he goes very quiet on the other end, and then he says it back.
I put the phone down and I stand in that ballroom in the middle of eleven pieces of paper and I have no idea what I am anymore.
Soldo comes to find me at six.
He does it in stages, which is his method. He appears in the doorway. He sits. He looks at four hundred documents, the largest and most beautiful thing he has ever been offered, and I watch a moral struggle take place inside a four-pound animal.
“Do not,” I say.
He walks the perimeter first. All the way around, at the edge, without touching one page, which takes a long time and which he does with tremendous seriousness.
Then he comes back to the doorway, and sits down again, and yells at me.
“I know,” I say.
He yells again.
“I know.”
And then he goes and lies down on the one square foot of parquet that is not covered in my dead husband, and puts his chin on his feet, and waits for me to be finished, and I have to stand there for a second with my hand over my mouth.
I go up at nine, and I stop halfway.
I get as far as the turn of the back stairs, where the window is, and I put my hand on the rail and my legs simply do not do the next part, and I sit down on the step in the dark and I stay there.
He finds me. He has been letting me be alone all day in a way that is not the same as leaving me.
He sits down on the step below mine so that I am looking at the back of his head.
“I need something,” I say.
“Ask.”
“I do not want to be a person for a while.”
He is quiet.
“I want you to take me upstairs and I do not want to think about paper or my husband or my father or my name. I want you to use me. And I do not want you to be careful with me, and I do not want you to be sweet, and I do not want you to say my name.”
He turns around.
“Two of those,” he says.
“Lorenzo.”
“You get two of them.” He is looking up at me from one step down, and his voice has gone somewhere low and even. “I will take you upstairs. I will not be careful. I will not be sweet, and you can have it as hard as you want it and I will not stop when it stops being polite.”
“And the third?”
“I am going to say your name,” he says, “and I am going to keep saying it.”
“That is the one I asked for.”
“I know it is.” He puts his hand around my ankle, which is the only part of me he is touching.
“You can have anything in this house tonight except that. You want to be nobody for an hour. I understand it, and I have wanted it myself, and you are not going to get it from me, because there is a man out there who has spent ten years turning you into a thing on a page, and I am not going to spend an hour helping him.”
I sit on that step in the dark, and I cannot breathe properly.
“Then say it a lot,” I say.
He does not take me upstairs.