29. The Fourteenth of March
THE FOURTEENTH OF MARCH
VALERIA
There are two of Lorenzo’s men on Doyle Avenue and both of them are holding cups.
Not paper cups. Cups, with saucers, one balanced on a car roof, and I understand before I reach the gate that this woman has beaten me by three hours.
“Mrs D’Amato.”
“Rinaldi,” I say. “How long have you been here?”
“Since ten past four.”
“And the coffee?”
“Half four.” He looks at the cup like it has done something to him. “She came out in a dressing gown and said, you are going to be here a while, do you take sugar? She has been out twice since.”
The path to that door is eleven flagstones long and I have walked it four times in four weeks, and this morning I count them.
She opens it before I knock.
Renata Alba is eighty-one and she is dressed, properly dressed, in a blue cardigan with the sleeves pushed up, and she looks at me and something gives way in her face that I have not seen in four years.
“You came up the path,” she says.
“Yes.”
“I have been in the front room since a quarter past seven watching the end of it.” She stands back. “Come in. The kettle has been on four times, and I have thrown three pots away because I am not going to pretend to you this morning about anything, including a pot of tea.”
The letters are on the table.
Fifteen of them, squared up in a row, in a house that is otherwise drifts and stacks and eleven years of paper avalanche. Somebody has cleared four feet of table with her forearm.
“He telephoned me,” Renata says.
“When?”
“Twenty past seven. From a car.” She sits opposite the letters, not beside them. “Fifteen years, not once, and I have never had a voice for him, and it turns out it is quite an ordinary voice, and I have been sitting here since trying to get over that.”
“What did he say?”
“He said, Mrs Alba, Valeria Rinaldi is going to come up your path this morning, and I would like you to give her all of it.” Her chin is not steady and her voice is. “And I said, all of what? And he said, all of it. And then he said thank you for the letters, and hung up before I could answer him.”
She puts her hand flat on the table six inches from the row.
“Fifteen years I have written to that man and never had a word back,” she says. “And this morning he used eleven of them to tell me to hand myself in.”
I sit down. I do not touch anything.
“Tell me first,” I say. “In your own order. I will not read a word until you have said it.”
And Renata Alba’s eyes go, and she puts the back of her wrist against her mouth.
“Nobody has ever done that,” she says. “They read the paper and then they come and ask you to explain the paper.”
“I know.”
“You do know. That is the trouble with you.”
And then she lies to me.
“Isabella D’Amato was my friend,” she says.
“I have kept her letters for eleven years because somebody in this world had to keep them, and I have never asked that family for a thing. There is money that comes to me and I have never known where it comes from, and I have decided that at my age a person is entitled to some things she has not interrogated.”
She stops.
I do not say anything at all.
Her hand goes to her collar.
“That is not true,” she says.
“No.”
“I have had that sentence for fifteen years.” Her voice cracks straight down the middle.
“I have said it to the ceiling at four in the morning. I have said it so many times that I have got quite good at it, and I have just heard it come out of my mouth in front of somebody and it is filthy, I am so ashamed…”
“Renata.”
“Let me do it properly.” Her jaw sets, and there is the woman who corrects my grammar.
“Sixteen hundred and forty dollars. On the first of the month, since May of 2011. Into an account with my name and nobody else’s.
Never late. It has gone up twice, and I never asked for either.
” She looks at her hands. “The first year I did not spend it. In the March I bought a roof.”
“And you knew what it was.”
“From the June of the first year.” She says it in the hard words on purpose.
“I have taken that money for fifteen years knowing, and I want that on the record in those words and not in kinder ones, because I have watched this family put kinder words on things for eleven years and I have typed most of them.”
“What happened in the June?”
“Elio died in the March, and the next morning the back door was hanging true.” She stops.
“It had dropped nineteen years before. It caught on the sill and you had to lift it with your knee, and I asked him, I asked him for nineteen years, and after a while the asking is the whole marriage.” Her mouth works.
“And in the June the first envelope came, in my own name, with no man on the mandate, and I stood in this kitchen at half past six holding a milk bottle and I knew all of it at once. I knew, the way you know a stair is not there.”
“And you wrote to him.”
“Five words.” She touches the first envelope without lifting it. “Thank you for the door. Then nothing for a year. Then it was the fourteenth of March again, and I found I had put the paper in the machine.”
“Why the fourteenth?”
“Because that is the day he did it.”
“Elio died on the sixteenth and it was called his heart, and it was, in the end, his heart.” Flat.
“But the fourteenth is the day a man I did not know came to my back door and asked whether it stuck, and I said yes, and he said he would come back with a plane and a chisel. And he did. On the seventeenth. The morning after he died. He took it off its hinges and did it properly on two chairs in the yard and swept up the shavings, and he did not say one word about what had happened in this house in between.”
“You saw him.”
“I gave him a cup of tea and asked if he was from the parish.”
She laughs once.
“He said no. He said he was a friend of somebody’s mother.”
She is quiet a moment, and then she says the thing I am not ready for.
“I miss him.”
“Renata.”
“Not the last ten years. Not the man at the parties.” She is looking at the middle of the table.
“There was about eighteen months at the beginning where he used to warm my side of the bed. He would get in first on purpose and then move over. I have never told anybody and I have thought about it every single day for fifteen years.” Her face is wet, and she does not wipe it.
“I did not have a monster killed. I had a man killed who used to warm my side of the bed and then spent nineteen years making sure there was nothing in these rooms that was mine, and I would do it again, and I miss him. Put all of that down or none of it.”
“I have to ask you the thing I came about,” I say.
“You have not come about the money.”
“No.”
“You have come about you.”
The room goes quiet, and outside somebody puts a cup down on a car roof.
“You came into that house four years ago in the November,” Renata says. “I was at the second Christmas because Isabella’s letters were being catalogued and Lorenzo wanted me at the table, and they put me on your left. And you did not eat.”
“Renata.”
“You thanked the girl four times for things she had not done, and you had your hands flat on the cloth on either side of the plate, and at the pudding your husband put his hand on the back of your neck and you went completely still.” Her voice does not change, and her eyes are streaming.
“Not frightened. Practiced. And I sat beside you with a glass of wine and I recognized it, because I did it at a table in this house for nineteen years and I know what it looks like from four inches away.”
“And you said nothing.”
“For four years.”
“Why?”
And Renata Alba puts both hands flat on the table on either side of nothing, the third person I have watched do that in eighteen hours, and says:
“Because I was afraid it would stop.”
“There is no better version underneath,” she says.
“If I had gone to Lorenzo D’Amato and said, your brother’s wife does not eat, somebody would have asked how I came to be so quick at seeing it, and somebody would have gone and looked at the March of 2011, and there is a line in a ledger with my name on the end of it.
I have a roof that money bought and I am eighty-one and I have nowhere.
” Her voice finally goes. “I chose the money. Four years. Every first of the month. And every one of those months I sat in this room and knew about you.”
“Renata.”
“Do not.” She holds a hand up. “Do not make it smaller.”
“And the letters?” I say.
“Read the last one.”
“You tell me.”
“No.” She pushes it across with two fingers. “This one you read. I had it in me to say the other thing out loud and I have not got it in me to say this, and I have had four months to find out.”
The envelope is not sealed. The paper is hers and the typing is hers and the small e is filled in, because that machine has been eating the small e since 1988 and she has never had it repaired.
14 March.
I have never asked you for anything, and I am not going to pretend this is not what it is.
There is a woman in that house. She is the wife of the middle one. I do not believe for one moment that you have failed to see it, and I have decided I would rather be wrong about you than go on being right about myself.
Her husband puts his hand on the back of her neck at the pudding and she goes still, and I have been going still at tables since I was twenty-six, and I know how many years it takes to learn that, and she has learned it in three.
I have taken your money for fifteen years and never once asked what it cost.
I am asking.
You will want to know why now and not in the first year. The answer is that I spent four years telling myself she is cleverer than I was. She is. It has not made any difference at all, and I have finally understood that it was never going to.
I know what I am doing. I do not want a letter back, and if you never do a thing about it I will not write again.
But I am not going to sit at another Christmas.
R.A.
“March,” I say.
“The fourteenth.”
“He did not do it until July.”
“No.”
“Four months.”