34. A Real Question
A REAL QUESTION
LORENZO
I get back at half past nine, and the house is wrong.
Not empty. There are four men on the property, and Carmela has left the lamps on in the hall the way she has every night for thirty years. It is wrong because there is nobody in the kitchen.
There has been somebody in that kitchen at half past nine at night for thirty-one years.
Standing at the counter with a cloth over his shoulder.
Sitting on the side with his back to the yard door doing the crossword badly on purpose so somebody would come and correct him.
I walked past the door tonight and my whole body turned to look and there was nothing there.
The cards are still on the table in their rows. Thirty-five of them, and a thirty-sixth at the front now, in my wife’s hand, ruled badly.
Soldo is under the table on the chair side.
Valeria stops in the doorway with her coat still on.
“I keep expecting to smell butter.”
“Yes.”
“Four years in this house and I never once wondered why a grown man cooked breakfast for two other grown men every day of his life.”
“Nobody did.”
“I know,” she says. “That is what I am saying.”
She goes up at twenty to ten.
I do not follow her.
I sit in my father’s study with the lamp off and do not drink anything and do not do anything at all, which I have not done since I was twenty-six years old.
At some point I take the string out of my pocket.
It has been there since Friday. Household string, brown, knotted twice with a loop pulled through. My mother tied it round a box in 1995 and I untied it on a floor in the dark and did not cut it.
I sit in the chair I make men stand in front of, holding a piece of string, and I understand that I have been here an hour because I do not know whether I am allowed upstairs.
Whether I am allowed.
At eleven I go and stand outside our bedroom door and put my hand flat on it and do not knock, and I stand there long enough to hear the floor shift on the other side.
I take my hand off the door.
“Come in,” she says. “For God’s sake.”
She has not undressed. She is in the clothes she has been in since six this morning, shoes off, hair down, face washed, sitting on the end of the bed.
There is a suitcase standing open on the floor.
There is nothing in it.
She sees me see it.
“It has been there since Wednesday week.”
“I know.”
“You have never mentioned it.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because mentioning it is a way of asking you not to use it,” I say, “and I have not had the right to ask you for anything since I sat in a dining room and did not say your name.”
Valeria looks at me a long moment.
Then she reaches down, closes it, and pushes it under the bed with her heel.
“Sit down,” she says. “Not there. Here.”
I sit on the end of the bed beside her, not touching, which is how we have sat for nineteen days.
“I am not going to say I forgive you.”
“I know.”
“I want to be exact, because I have been exact about everybody else in this business and you deserve the same instrument.” Her hands are in her lap.
“I have not forgiven you. You wrote ask her in the margin of a page and were told no, and you did not say it again, and I have not put that down for one hour since. There is a version of tomorrow where I take that case out from under the bed and go.”
“Yes.”
“Do not say yes like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like a man agreeing to his sentence.” She turns her head. “You have done it since Friday. Every time I put a knife in you, you say yes, and you take it, and your face does that thing. You are paying me in installments, and it is very restful for you.”
I do not say anything.
“Say something that costs you.”
And I look at the woman I did not ask, in a house where nobody asks anybody anything, on the day my brother put himself into a file for the rest of time.
“I am frightened,” I say. “All the time. Since the cathedral, and I have not said it out loud to one person, and it is not about Fabrizio and it is not the police.”
My voice will not stay where I put it. “Ciro is dead. Giulio is dead. Fabrizio walked into a building this morning and shut the door behind him. There is one left. She has a suitcase under the bed. I lie next to her every night doing arithmetic on how many hours I have, and I cannot make myself ask her to stay, because the last time I said out loud what I wanted, I said it in a room full of men, and it cost her everything.”
The room is very quiet.
“So I have decided to be here, and be silent, and be good, forever. And that way I never have to be the man who asked for something again.”
Valeria does not move for a long moment.
“There it is,” she says.
“Do you know what he did on that kitchen floor?”
“I was there.”
“Out loud.”
“He got down on one knee so his eyes were below a child’s and said, I am going to ask you a real question, which means whatever you say is what happens.”
“And then he waited.” She is looking at her hands. “It took that boy a long time, and nobody filled the silence. Four years in your family and it is the only time I have ever seen one of you ask a question and then be quiet.”
“Valeria.”
“I am going to ask you for something and then I am going to be quiet, and you are not allowed to work out what I want first and give me that instead.” Her chin does not move. “Which is the thing you do. It is the thing all three of you do, and I have been managed by experts for four years.”
She turns to face me and pulls one foot up under her.
“Lorenzo. Do you want me?”
“That is not a real…”
“It is the realest question in this house. You have not touched me in nineteen days. Not once. Not in the sewing room, not in the car park, not when I told you I was glad my husband was dead.
“You have been four inches from me for seven days being careful, and I have lain next to you in the dark listening to you not move, and I cannot tell whether it is grief or guilt or penance or whether you have simply stopped.”
Her voice goes. “I am not going to guess. I have spent my whole life guessing what men wanted and being good at it and being wrong. So say it. In words. And if the answer is no, I will hear it and I will still be here in the morning.”
And she stops.
And she waits.
It takes me a long time. She lets it.
“Yes,” I say.
“The whole thing.”
“I want you.” My hands have gone. “Since a Thursday in November four years ago when you sat at that table and did not eat and I thought, there is somebody awake in this house. Every day since.
“And I have been ashamed of it every one of those days, because you were my brother’s bride, and because there is a version of that wanting which is exactly what those men in that room assumed I was, and I have spent six weeks unable to tell mine from theirs.”
I make myself look at her. “I have not touched you in nineteen days because I did not know whether you could tell either.”
Her face does something I have not seen in four years.
“There,” she says. “That is what it sounds like when you say a thing.”
“Valeria.”
“Now ask me one.”
“What?”
“You have never asked anybody for anything in your life. Not one thing. You give orders and you make arrangements and you wait to be told.” She has not moved. “Ask me. Out loud. And I will tell you the truth, whatever it is.”
And I sit on the end of my own bed at ten past eleven at night, forty-five years old, with my mother’s string in my pocket, and find that my mouth will not work.
“Take your time. Nobody is going to fill it.”
So she waits. And it is the longest anybody has ever waited for me.
“Stay,” I say.
“That is a big one.”
“I know.”
“You could have started smaller.”
“I have got forty-five years of not asking stored up, and it has come out in the wrong order.”
And Valeria Rinaldi laughs, properly, out loud, for the first time since the nineteenth of July, and then her face folds and she puts her hand over her mouth and she is crying and laughing at once, and says from behind it:
“Yes.”
“Say the whole thing.”
“You are learning very fast for a man of forty-five.”
“All of it.”
“I am staying. Not because I have forgiven you. Not because of tonight.” She takes her hand down.
“I am staying because at four o’clock this morning I found out what happens in a family where nobody asks, and I watched it eat three generations, and I would rather build the other kind, and there is exactly one person in the world I want to build it with, and he is sitting on this bed being frightened at me. ”
Then she takes my right hand, turns it over, and pulls Giulio’s ring off my finger.
I have worn it five weeks. She does it in about two seconds, and she does not ask.
“I am allowed,” she says. “It was mine before it was yours.”
She holds it in her fist a moment, then leans past me and sets it on the table beside the bed, face up.
“That stays there. It has a dead man in it, and he has a right to be in the room.” She comes back. “He is not going to be in the bed.”
She kisses me.
She does it, and I let her, and I keep my hands where they are on the counterpane, and after a moment she pulls back an inch and says against my mouth:
“No.”
“Valeria.”
“You are doing it again. You are letting me. You are being permitted to be kissed, so that if it is wrong, it is my doing.” Her palm is flat on my chest. “Put your hands on me and mean it, or do not touch me at all. I would genuinely rather have nothing.”
“You do not know what you are…”
“I know exactly what I am asking for, I have said it in a full sentence twice, and if you tell me once more tonight that I do not understand my own request, I will put that case back on the bed.”
And something in me comes off its hinges.
I get a hand into her hair and kiss her the way I have not let myself think about in four years, and she makes a sound against my mouth that goes straight down my spine, and her fists close in my shirt and pull, and a button goes across the floorboards and neither of us looks for it.
“Yes,” she breathes. “Like that. That.”