27. The First of the Month
THE FIRST OF THE MONTH
VALERIA
He sent me out for my coat.
I am standing in the yard at twenty past six in a coat I did not need, and the sky over the wall has gone the color of the inside of a shell.
He did not send me out because it was cold.
He sent me out because Lorenzo was coming down the stairs and there was going to be a conversation, and he made a decision about which people should be in the room for it, and he made it on my behalf, kindly, in four seconds, while holding a pan.
Soldo is on the mat by the south door with his tail wrapped round his feet, facing an empty drive.
“You too,” I tell him.
He does not look at me. He has not looked at anyone in five weeks.
I put my hands in the pockets of the coat and find, in the left one, the folded page with the ruled box on it, because I have not put a document down before I was finished with it since I was twenty-four years old.
She ruled it. She did all of that so that one day somebody who was not her could pick it up and understand it with her not in the room.
Mine is inside on the hall table where I put it down when I came in. Two books of it now, five weeks of the truest work I have ever done, every page folded down the middle as my mother folded hers, for an audience of one.
I have written every line of it to myself. It has not once occurred to me, in five weeks, to write any of it for anybody else.
Then I go back in.
There are three cups down off the hook now.
He has laid the table the way it is laid in this house at seven in the morning, which is butter in a dish and not in its paper, and the cloth folded in three.
He has done eggs and he has done them properly.
Lorenzo is at the far end of the room with his back against the dresser and his arms folded and his knuckles split, and he has not sat down, and neither of them has said one word in the four minutes I was outside.
“Sit down, Valeria,” Fabrizio says. “You have been up all night. You are no good to anybody gray.”
I sit down.
He puts the plate in front of me and turns it so the handle of the fork comes to my hand, and I have watched him do that for five weeks and never once seen him do it.
“Eat it or do not eat it,” he says. “But it is there.”
“Fabrizio,” Lorenzo says.
“I know.”
“You do not know what I am going to say.”
“You have my mother’s handwriting in your hand, you have not slept, and Silvano Rinaldi’s car was on the drive at five.” He wipes the pan and sets it upside down on the rack. “I know.”
My mother’s. Thirty-one years and neither of them has ever once corrected it.
He sits down. Not at the head. On the side, with his back to the yard door, where he has sat for thirty-one years, which I now understand he chose at nine years old and has never revisited.
“Ask me,” he says.
That terrible courtesy.
“No,” I say.
He turns his head.
“You have done it twice in five minutes.” “You sent me outside so you could choose who was in the room. Now you are telling us to ask, so you can choose which question gets answered. You will say the whole thing, from the front, and you will not be helped.”
Lorenzo looks at me.
Fabrizio puts both hands flat on the table on either side of his plate.
And says it.
“There were thirty-four cards in your mother’s box,” he says.
“I took them the week after she died. I was nine, and I did not know what they were, only that they were hers and your father was going through the house. I kept them in a bag inside the wall of the blue room behind a loose board, and I have moved them eleven times in thirty-one years, and they are upstairs now, four feet from where you slept.”
“What I found at two o’clock this morning was a box of blanks,” Lorenzo says. “She bought more cards than she ever got to use.”
“And I have the used ones. Thirty-four. Nine of them are not finished.”
“Not finished.”
“Nine of them,” Fabrizio says, “are women she sat with, and offered a bus and a name and money in their own hand, and they said no, and she wrote down why in their words and went back and asked again, and then it was February and nobody ever went back a third time.”
He turns his cup a quarter turn.
“Twenty-five have an outcome. Some are good. One got to Warwick and remarried and sent your mother a photograph of a kitchen with a note on the back saying the taps were her own. Some are not good, but they are written down, because she thought the writing down was the work.” His thumb moves on the handle. “Nine are white.”
“And you went back?” I say.
“Not for a long time. It took me years to become a man who could do anything for anybody.” He is looking at the butter dish.
“The first one, the woman was dead before I could get to her.
2001. Her husband outlived her by nine years in a house he did not deserve and I sat outside it in a car for two nights when I was fifteen and did nothing, because I had a bicycle and no idea.
“The second one had a daughter. The daughter was thirty-one and married to a man who put her in the Miriam twice, and that is when I understood the list is not thirty-four women. It is a line going forward. Nine houses nobody ever went back to, and everything those houses have produced since is on that page whether she ruled a box for it or not.”
“How many?” I say.
“Nine houses. Fourteen men, because some houses kept producing them. Over fifteen years.”
Lorenzo comes off the dresser.
“Fourteen.”
“Yes.”
“Say them.”
“Enzo.”
“You have sat at my table every night for eleven years.” His voice does something I have not heard in it. “Say them.”
And Fabrizio says fourteen names in the order they happened, without pausing, and I do not know eleven of them.
I know three.
I put my fork down at the second one, and I do not pick it up again.
“Alba,” I say.
The kitchen goes very quiet.
“Say that one again.”
“Elio Alba,” Fabrizio says. “March, 2011. He had a bad heart already. It did not take much, and I have never pretended otherwise.”
“Renata’s husband.”
“Yes.”
“Renata Alba is one of the nine.”
“Renata Alba is card nineteen,” he says. “Your mother sat with her in November of 1995, three weeks before she sat with mine, and offered her the same six things in the same order, and Renata said no, and the reason is written down and it is that she had nowhere to put a piano.”
Lorenzo makes a sound.
“That is what it says. She will not go because of the instrument, and I have decided not to argue with her about the instrument, because the instrument is not what she means and both of us know it.” Fabrizio’s mouth moves. “She was fifty. She stayed fifteen more years.”
“And she knows,” I say. “Does she know?”
“She has known since the June after.”
“Fabrizio.”
“She wrote to me,” he says. “Four months after he died she sent a letter to a box I have had since I was twenty, and it said one line, and the line was thank you for the door, because I had done the back door of that house on my way out and she came down in the morning and found it hanging true for the first time in nineteen years.” He is not looking at anybody.
“She has written to me every year on the fourteenth of March since. Fifteen letters. She has never once used a word you could put in front of anybody, and I have never answered one of them.”
I think about a woman of eighty-one sitting in a room full of her own paper for eleven years, protecting Isabella’s letters from us, telling me to turn every page over.
Telling me to turn every page over.
“She has been pointing at it the whole time,” I say.
“She has been pointing at it for eleven years and none of you have ever once asked her a question she could answer honestly,” Fabrizio says.
“There are two of my men on her street,” Lorenzo says.
“I know. Tazio put them there at four.”
“To protect her.”
“Yes.”
“From you.”
“Yes,” Fabrizio says. “And she will have made them coffee by now, because she has been waiting eleven years for somebody in this family to come up that path and finally ask, and she does not care which of us it is.”
Lorenzo sits down.
He does it suddenly, he puts one hand over his eyes and holds it there.
“I am relieved,” he says.
“Enzo.”
“No, I want it said out loud, because I have been standing there for eleven minutes waiting for the part where I am angry, and it has not come, and what came instead was thank God.” His voice is completely level.
“Because for five weeks it has been mine. Giulio was mine. Ciro was mine. The minutes were mine. And you have just walked in here and taken fourteen bodies off me, and I sat down because my legs went, and my legs went from relief.”
Fabrizio does not say anything.
“That is what he did to me,” Lorenzo says to me. “Do you understand? Even now. Even here. He has found a way to carry it for me.”
“I did not do that on purpose,” Fabrizio says.
“I know,” Lorenzo says. “That is what makes it unbearable.”
“Giulio was not on your mother’s list,” I say.
“No.”
“Then say why.”
He does not answer for a while.
“Because of you.”
“That is a location, not a mechanism. Say the mechanism.”
And he looks up, and Fabrizio Serra looks like a man who has been asked something he did not prepare.
“Because you came into this house four years ago and you did not eat.”