26. Nobody Asked #2
“Tell her. Tell her I signed everything Keane put in front of me at four o’clock this morning in his car and the succession is gone. Tell her I have known since she was twenty-two. Tell her I am sorry.” His voice cracks straight across. “You are her husband. She will take it better from you.”
And I stand in my mother’s kitchen at ten past five in the morning and understand exactly what is being asked of me, and it is the third time in six hours.
“No,” I say.
“Lorenzo.”
“She is forty feet above your head and she has been awake for twenty-two hours and she will come down for you if I go up and get her.” I do not raise my voice.
“Go and say it to her face. She is the only person in this entire business who has never once been told anything directly, and I am not going to be another man who carries a message about her over her own head.”
Then he says, “I cannot.”
“I know.”
And he gets up, and puts his chair in under the table because his mother taught him to, and goes out to his car without going up those stairs, and that is the last time either of us sees him for a year.
At the door he stops without turning round.
“He asked me once whether the boy had a mother. Orsi. Months afterward, in a car park, out of nothing.” His hand is on the frame.
“I said I did not know. I had not thought about it. And he said, all right, and has never mentioned it again in fourteen years.” He shakes his head slowly.
“I have thought about that more than I have thought about the boy, and I would like somebody to tell me what that makes me.”
Nobody tells him.
Valeria finds the folder at twenty to six.
“It was at the bottom of the linen box, under the sheets. It is the only thing in that room that was put somewhere on purpose.”
I read it standing up.
One sheet. Not a form. Ruled paper with the lines drawn against a straightedge and the headings written in by hand.
9.xii.95.
Woman: SERRA, Annamaria. 31. Two rooms off Chalkstone. Works nights at the laundry and hands the envelope over on the Friday.
Child: one. Boy. 9.
I sat with her on the eighth. She would not have me in the front room, she took me into the kitchen, and she apologized for the rooms four times and for the tea twice and for herself once, and I would like the record to show that the rooms were clean.
The boy did not leave the doorway of the back room the whole hour. He watched the front door the entire time I was talking to his mother. Not the man. The door.
Offered: papers, a bus, forty-eight hours. Rent six months in a name that is not hers. Money in her own hand every month and not through a man.
She said no.
I am writing down her reason in her words and not mine, because I have watched men in this family spend thirty years improving what women said to them.
“If I go and he finds me, he will not come for me. He will go and find the boy first and make me watch, and then it will not be a thing that happened to me, it will be a thing I did. I can carry what he does to me. I cannot carry what he would do because I ran.”
I asked her twice more. I did not ask a fourth time.
She has done the arithmetic, and she has got the right answer.
Next: 22 Dec. Go back. Ask again. Keep going back until she says a different thing or until I am dead.
And at the foot, two lines.
Before you go, fix one thing in her house that is broken. It is usually the first time in years that anybody has.
Whatever happens, you will be taken care of.
“The storm door,” Valeria says quietly. “Second year. She told us he came back in March with a new one in the car and would not take money for it.”
“And the letters end with the other one.”
“Ten years of them. Word for word.”
A note in the margin in pencil, pressed harder: Aldo says no.
Under it, in ink, in her hand and not steady: A. has taken the boy into the house tonight to make her come. She will not come. She will not come and she was right and I have handed him the thing she was frightened of. I am going to get this back.
Then, in a different pen, smaller:
22 Dec. Did not go. Unwell.
9 Jan. Did not go.
OUTCOME:
Nothing. White paper.
Valeria turns the sheet over, because she turns every page over, always. On the reverse, in pencil, in a hand that is not my mother’s:
Annamaria Serra. 4 February 1996. No service.
“Seven weeks,” Valeria says.
She puts it down on the clean paper and does not say anything for a while, and when she does she says it to the floorboards.
“Do you understand what he was told?”
“Finish it.”
She looks up. “Nobody told him she said no for him. All he ever knew is that a woman was asked whether she wanted him, three times, and the answer was no, and seven weeks later she was gone.”
“He has spent thirty-one years making absolutely certain that no woman anywhere near him is ever asked anything again. Not Concetta. Not Renata. Not me.”
She puts one finger on the blank line.
“She writes I am going to get this back,” Valeria says, with her finger still on the line. “Two weeks later she is too unwell to keep her own appointments. Eight weeks later she is gone, in the same February as the woman she was trying to get it back for.”
I hear the question she is not asking.
“Nobody looked,” I say. “She was tired, and then she was ill, and then she was gone, and nobody in this house has ever said out loud what you are not saying now.”
“Then I will say it once, and we will leave it where it falls.” She says it to the sheet and not to me. “Did she die, Lorenzo, or was it done to her?”
Nobody answers, because nobody alive can.
She drew around every pan on her board so that a kitchen could tell at a glance when one thing had been taken. Nobody ever drew around her.
And I stand in my mother’s sewing room at six in the morning holding a receipt for a coat, and what goes through me is not grief. It is recognition, and it is so cold it stops my breath.
Marry the Rinaldi widow. She is the door everything has walked through.
Ask her.
No.
“Say it,” Valeria says.
“I did not ask you either.”
“No.”
“He does not ask because a woman he loved gave the wrong answer.” My voice will not stay where I put it. “I did not ask you because I was frightened of losing a room.”
“Silvano was here,” she says.
I look at her.
“I was on the stairs from about four minutes in.”
“Valeria.”
“I want you to know that I was going to come down,” she says.
“I had my hand on the rail. And then I thought, no. If I go down there I have made it easy for him again, and I have been making it easy for the men in my family since I was nineteen years old, and I am going to sit here on this stair and let my brother be the man who could not.” Her eyes are streaming, and her voice is level.
“That is the first thing I have ever refused him.”
I write in the blank before I go up.
OUTCOME: Continued 24 August. L.D.
Then I find Tazio and give him four things.
Nobody moves on this property tonight and nobody uses a radio.
Two men on Renata Alba’s street by six and two on Concetta Vanni’s, and they are not to knock, and if either woman comes out they are to be told the truth.
Keane here at eight with everything he holds on the Providence account.
And the fourth.
“Find Fabrizio Serra. Do not approach him. Find out where he is standing, and come and tell me, and take nobody with you.”
Tazio does not ask me one question.
I go back down at ten past six with the birds starting in the yard, and there is a smell of butter coming out of my mother’s kitchen, which is what we have called that room for thirty years without one of us ever once thinking about why.
There are two cups down off the hook, and one of them is upside down on the saucer.
Fabrizio does not turn round.
“You did not sleep,” he says. “Sit down, Enzo. I will do you an egg.”
I do not sit down.
Soldo is on the mat by the south door with his tail around his feet, facing out at a gravel drive with nothing on it, which he has done every morning since Ciro, and which nobody in this house has once mentioned out loud.
“Gilda Renzi gave you a biscuit,” I say.
The pan goes on making its noise.
“When you were seventeen. You told me that at the bottom of her stairs two days ago with a cloth over her face. Nobody else in this family would put their name to anything for you and she did it in four seconds and then she gave you a biscuit like you were a child, and you were so angry about it you did not thank her, and you have thought about it once a year ever since.”
He lifts the pan off the heat and sets it on the cold ring.
“I gave you one the first night,” I say. “You carried it round every door in this house, and you did not eat it.”
Fabrizio wipes his hands and hangs the cloth back on the rail, exactly where she used to hang it.
“Where is she?” I say.
“I sent her out for her coat. It is cold in the yard.” He turns round at last, and something goes out of his face that has been in it since I was fourteen years old. “You showed me every door in this house, that first night. Do you remember? Every one of them.”
“I remember.”
“I have never forgotten a single one,” he says. “And I have never been able to work out why you did it, and I have had thirty-one years, and it is the only question I have ever wanted to ask anybody.”
And I stand in my mother’s kitchen and cannot tell him that the answer is because I was showing off, and that there was nothing in it at all.