23. Counted #2
“The second is that the eleven blanks are forged.” I watch it hit him.
“Not one of them has the lift. Every genuine hurried signature of your brother’s has it and the pink slip has it and eleven pieces of paper in that ballroom do not.
They were made slowly, by somebody with nowhere to be.
Giulio never signed those. He never gave anybody standing permission for anything.
He was a man who carried one box because he was told a frightened woman needed her husband on a bus. ”
Lorenzo puts one hand over his mouth.
“I have had that since three o’clock on Wednesday morning,” I say. “I wanted to give it to you as a present.”
Then I go upstairs and put my shoes on.
They bury Ciro Tebaldi at eleven o’clock on a cold bright morning with about four hundred people there, which is more than I have seen at any funeral, including my husbands’.
Peppe Mazza attends on two crutches he does not need, having been told by three separate doctors that he does not need them, and spends the entire service telling anyone within reach that the man in the orangery was seven feet tall.
By the third telling, the man has a rifle with a scope on it.
By the fourth he has body armor. Ciro’s sister, who has been dry-eyed and upright all morning, finally breaks down laughing into her handkerchief in the middle of a decade of the rosary, and half the row goes with her, and it is the only mercy anybody gets all day.
Rosalia is twenty-four.
She stands at the front with Ciro’s mother holding one of her arms and his sister holding the other, and she does not know most of these people, and every single one of them knows who she is.
Somebody had to tell her at two o’clock on a Thursday afternoon in a kitchen.
She is wearing a coat that is not warm enough, and she will not take the one they keep offering her.
I do not go near her. I have been where she is standing three times, and I know precisely how much use I would be.
She comes to me.
Halfway through, at the graveside, she works her way along the line and stops in front of me and says, “You are the one he was guarding.”
There is nothing in her voice at all. She is only assembling the world.
“Yes,” I say.
She nods.
And then this girl, in a coat that is not warm enough, twelve hours after being handed a ring she never got asked with, says, “Then I am glad it worked.”
Fabrizio speaks last.
He does it badly, on purpose, I think, in short flat sentences, his coat open in the cold.
He says that he has been in this family since he was nine years old.
He says that in thirty-one years he has never once appeared on any list of the family’s men.
Not a payroll, not a table plan, not a Christmas envelope.
He says it without any self-pity at all, the way you would report the weather, and I watch two hundred men who have never thought about it for a second in their lives look at their shoes.
“Ciro counted me,” he says. “Two weeks ago he came up to me on the west lawn and he told me there were twenty-three men on this house, and I said twenty-two, and he said no. He had counted a cat, and he had counted me, and he was not going to be argued with about either one.”
He stops for a second.
“He counted everybody,” Fabrizio says. “That is all. That is the entire eulogy. Somebody should have done it for him.”
Then he steps back, and the priest takes over, and I stand there in the cold beside a man whose margin note is in my pocket, and I think two things at once, and I am not proud of the second one.
The first is that Fabrizio Serra just gave that man the only true thing anybody said today.
The second is that, in thirty-one years, nobody in this family ever put him on a list either, and I know exactly, precisely, in my body, what that does to a person, because I have spent nine years being the only woman in every room whose name everybody knows and nobody says.
The county released him on the Friday. They lower him at half past twelve.
Rosalia does not cry until the very end and then she does it the way people do when they have been holding it since Thursday, and Ciro’s mother holds her up, and four hundred people look at the ground.
Lorenzo stands beside me the entire time and does not once try to take my hand, which is the single most intelligent thing that man has ever done.
And I stand at the edge of a hole in the ground and I think about a numbered list.
She is the door everything has walked through.
They are right. That is the thing nobody in that room understood about what they were writing down, not Zoli, not my father, not my husband with his two words in the margin.
Every man who has ever wanted something from this family has come through me.
Domenico. Sandro. Giulio. The money, the trust, the fund, the whole rotten hundred years of it, all of it has walked through one woman.
They just decided which way I opened.
Nobody asked me.
So I stand in the cold with my hand on my husband’s arm because there are four hundred people watching, and I make the only decision left in this that is actually mine.
They are right that I am the door.
They are wrong about which way it swings.