27. The First of the Month #2
“Your third dinner. You sat with your hands flat on the table on either side of the plate and you watched the door to the hall and you did not touch the food, and you thanked Carmela four times for things she had not done yet.” His voice does not rise.
“I have been that at a table. I went upstairs afterwards and opened your husband’s accounts, and inside eleven days I had six things about Giulio D’Amato his own brother did not have, and by the end of that year I had eleven.
“He was not hitting you. I want that said, because I have been asked it in my own head a thousand times and the answer is no, and it did not matter. He put a listening device in a house he had already put you in. He was inside your telephone for three years. He was going to trade you to the Catania table in the spring and he had put the number in writing, and the number was low.”
“So no. He was not on her list. I put him on it.”
“And you did not come to me.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because you would have said no.”
And the kitchen goes out from under me, because he is right.
I have known he was right since about four o’clock this morning, and I have been carrying it around this house for two hours pretending it was outrage.
“You would have said give me time,” he says, “or let me handle it. You would have believed it. You are the most capable person in this family and that is exactly the thing that would have killed you, and in eighteen months you would have been in a house outside Palermo belonging to a man who paid four hundred thousand for you, still certain you could manage it.”
“Yes,” I say.
Both of them look at me.
“That is what I would have said.” My hands are flat on the table on either side of the plate, and I see him see it.
“I want that in the room, because everybody in this house has spent five weeks handling me. I would have said no. I would have said no and I would have been wrong, and I would have gone to Sicily in the spring with a folder under my arm, certain I had a plan.”
“Valeria,” Lorenzo says.
“Let me finish.”
“And I am glad he is dead.”
Nobody moves.
“I have known that since the third day, and I have not said it to one living person. I stood in that cathedral and I put my hand on the wood and what I felt was that my chest had come open, and I have spent five weeks building a case and turning pages and being scrupulous so that I would not have to sit still long enough to notice it.” My voice goes, and I keep going anyway.
“So when you ask me whether I am the woman in the kitchen off Chalkstone. No. She said no and she meant it and she died for it. I did not say anything at all. Somebody killed my husband for me and I have been walking round this house grateful and calling it grief, and that is not the same thing as being a victim, and I will not be filed as one.”
The clock in the hall does the half hour.
“I know,” Fabrizio says.
I look at him.
“You knew?”
“I saw your face at the graveside,” he says, quite gently, “before you got it arranged. About four seconds. I have been the only person in this family who knew what you were carrying and I have never mentioned it, and I would like some credit for that, and I understand that I will not be getting any.”
I take the page out of my coat pocket and put it on the table between the butter and his cup, face up, turned the right way round for him.
“Read it standing up. That is what you told Lorenzo to do with things. So stand up.”
“Valeria.”
“Stand up.”
He stands up.
And he reads his mother’s handwriting for the first time in thirty-one years, and gets four lines in, and his hand goes out to the back of the chair.
Offered: papers, a bus, forty-eight hours.
She said no.
“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 asked her twice more. I did not ask a fourth time.
He reads it three times. I count.
“This is Isabella’s.”
“Yes.”
“She wrote down what my mother said.”
“Word for word. And she says why. Because I have watched men in this family spend thirty years improving what women said to them.”
He sits. The chair takes him.
“She said no.”
“She said no for you.” I lean over the table.
“She was asked three times and she said no three times and every one of them was about a nine-year-old boy standing in a doorway watching the front door. She did not refuse to be saved. She refused to be saved at your cost, and she did the arithmetic in front of a stranger in her own kitchen and got the right answer.”
“She could have gone.”
“She could have gone and left you in that house with him. She would not.”
“She could have gone.”
“Fabrizio.”
“She could have gone,” he says, and Lorenzo is up and halfway across the kitchen with his hands open and stops, because there is nothing in thirty-one years of this to tell him what you do here.
Fabrizio puts his fist against his mouth and holds it.
“I have spent my whole life,” he says, and stops. “Making certain no woman is ever put in that room and asked that question. Because the last time a woman was asked it she gave the wrong answer and it killed her.”
“Yes.”
“And she gave the right one.” He is looking at the page. “She gave the right one, and it killed her, and it was still the right one.”
Nobody says anything.
“Then I have been doing it wrong,” he says. “For fifteen years. To fourteen men and nine women and to you.”
And I think for one entire second, one whole second, that I have got him.
Then he lifts his head and asks me a question.
“Do you want me to stop?”
And the floor tilts.
Because I know what he is doing before he has finished the sentence, the way you know a stair is not there. He has had that page for ninety seconds. He has learned that his mother was asked and chose, and that the choosing was right, and he has taken about eleven seconds to convert it.
He is not repenting.
He is promoting me.
“No,” I say.
“Valeria.”
“No. You do not get to do that.” I am on my feet and do not remember standing.
“You have known it for a minute and a half, and you have already worked out how to put it down on me. You want me to say stop, so everything after this is a thing I chose. You want me to say go on, so everything after this is a thing I chose. There is no answer to that question that does not end with your hands clean and mine full.”
“That is not…”
“It is exactly what it is.” My voice cracks, and I let it.
“That is precisely what was done to your mother, and it is not a gift, Fabrizio, it is a bill. She was handed the weight of you and she carried it and it killed her in seven weeks, and you have picked it up off her page while it is still warm and set it down in front of me with the fork turned round to my hand.”
“Ask me something you do not already know the answer to,” I say. “You have never done it in your life.”
The clock goes seven.
And Fabrizio Serra sits in his mother’s chair in a kitchen that has been called his mother’s kitchen for thirty years by people who never once thought about which mother, and looks at me, and says:
“Did she ever say my name?”
“On the page. Does she write it down? My mother. Anywhere.”
I have read that document five times in two hours. And there is no version of the next four seconds in which I am not the person who does this to him.
There is a page in my own book with a space on it where an eleventh name goes. It has been empty since the fifth night, because neither of us would say it and I did not write it.
She kept his name off a page to keep him alive. I kept it off mine, and I have never once asked myself what I was doing.
“No,” I say. “She writes the boy. Nine years old. She kept your name off the paper so it could not be read in this house.”
He nods slowly.
“That is all right,” he says. “That was correct. That was the correct thing to do.”
Then he takes all three plates, which nobody has touched, and scrapes them into the bin one after another, and I watch him do it and think: that is the third time this morning that a plate has been put in front of somebody in this room and gone cold, and he has still not eaten anything himself.
He rinses them. Takes the cloth off the rail and dries his hands and hangs it back exactly where it goes.
“Card twenty-eight is a house on Bond Street,” he says, with his back to us. “It has been white for thirty-eight years. There is a girl in it who is nineteen, and she is the granddaughter, and I have had a man outside it since Thursday because on Tuesday she stopped eating in front of people.”
Lorenzo says his name.
“I will not touch her,” Fabrizio says. “I have never in my life touched a woman on that list, and I never will.” He turns round, and his face is dry.
“I am going to go and sit in her kitchen and offer her six things in the right order.
“And she is going to say no, Valeria. They almost always do. And then I am going to have to decide what kind of man I am at the fourth time of asking, and I have had thirty-one years to work it out and I still do not know.”
He takes his coat off the hook.
“Do not follow me out to the car,” he says. “Enzo. I am asking you.”
And Lorenzo, who has never in his life been asked for anything by this man, who has given him a house and a name and every door in it and has never been asked for a single thing in return, sits down at the table with his split hands in front of him and lets him go.