Renzo's Objection

Renzo came on the Saturday at eleven, which was an hour later than he had said and about nine minutes after I had stopped pretending I was not watching the clock.

He had his folder. He had also, I noticed, had his hair cut badly, and there was a wedding ring on his right hand that had not been there in December, and I did not ask about either of those things, because we are not friends. We are two people who are extremely careful with the same dead woman.

Mateo told him about the missing chapter before he had his coat off. He did it plainly and in the right order — the schedule, the count, the white space at page one hundred and eighty-six, the Wednesday with nothing behind it — and he did not soften it and he did not manage it, and it took him about ninety seconds, and I sat on the window seat and listened to a man I have known for fourteen years deliver bad news without once arranging where it would land.

Renzo listened with his coat half off. When it was finished he finished taking his coat off and put it on the hook.

“Fourteen,” he said.

“We’re calling it fourteen. There’s no number on it. It’s the fourteenth break that isn’t there.”

“Right.” He sat down in his mother’s reading chair, which he had not done once since September, and looked at the ceiling for a while. Then he said: “In the summer. July, maybe August. I asked her how it was going and she said it was finished except for one chapter, and I said, is it not written, and she said—“

He stopped and redid the sentence, which is a thing his mother’s son would do.

“She said: è scritto. L’ho tolto. It’s written. I took it out.” He was still looking at the ceiling. “And I said why, and she said, because it’s true, and the rest of it is only well written.”

Nobody said anything.

“I thought she was being — you know how she was. I thought she was doing the thing she did at festivals.” Renzo brought his eyes down. “I didn’t ask her a second time. She was ill and I was being careful with her and I did not ask her a second time, and now I have spent four months sending you people numbered lists about a comma.”

“Your lists are good,” I said.

“My lists are not the point, Elodie.”

“No. But they’re good.”

He looked at me with an expression I could not classify, which in his case is not unusual, and then he opened the folder and we got on with the thing he had actually come about.

· · ·Scene break

“Page two hundred and seventy-one,” he said.

We had been waiting for it. We had, in fact, been waiting for it since Tuesday, when the numbered email had come in with the subject line I want to talk about this one out loud, which is not a thing Renzo Ferro had done before.

It is the bar scene. It is the only time in the entire novel that Nella and Corrado are in a room together after he goes, eighteen months on, by arrangement, for forty minutes, in a bar near the station with a football match on above the bottles. They are both extremely polite. He asks about her sister. She asks about his mother. It is eleven pages of two people passing each other plates, and then at the end of it, standing up, with her coat already half on, she says one sentence and leaves.

Non mi hai mai mentito; mi hai solo lasciato indovinare per otto anni.

You never lied to me; you only left me guessing for eight years.

We had both kept the semicolon. Mine reads exactly as it does above. His is nunca me mentiste; sólo me dejaste adivinar durante ocho años, which is the same sentence with a different number of stresses in the second half, and we had spent ninety minutes on Thursday on whether the Spanish could carry it and had decided, together, in the end, that it could.

“You’ve softened it,” Renzo said.

“We haven’t touched it,” I said. “It’s a straight rendering. There isn’t a word in either version that isn’t in hers.”

“I’m not talking about the words.” He put the page down on the desk and turned it round so it faced us, which is a thing his mother used to do and which I would give a great deal to stop finding upsetting. “Read it out.”

I read it out.

“Now put a full stop in it,” he said, “and read it again.”

You never lied to me. You only left me guessing for eight years.

He sat back. “That’s the sentence.”

“That’s a different sentence.”

“That’s the sentence my mother meant. That’s a woman putting her coat on and going. What you’ve got is—“ he made a movement with his hand, a smoothing “—it’s beautiful. It flows. You’ve given it a hinge and a fall and it sounds like the end of a chapter, which it is, and every reviewer in Italy is going to quote it, and it is soft, and you have made it soft, both of you, in two languages, at the same time, which tells me you did it on purpose.”

And then something happened that I have thought about a great deal since, which is that Mateo stood up and came round the desk.

He did not argue from his chair. He came round to my side and put the page flat under my lamp and stood next to me and leaned in over it, and after a second I leaned in as well, because that is where the page was, and we were shoulder to shoulder over one sheet of paper with Renzo on the other side of the desk looking up at us.

“Say the full stop version again,” Mateo said.

Renzo said it again.

“There,” Mateo said. “There. You heard what it did. It gave him a breath.”

“It gave it—“

“It gave him a breath. Between the two halves. A full stop is a place where a man can flinch, and if he flinches the reader forgives him, because that is what a reader does with a man who flinches.” He put his finger on the semicolon, not quite touching the paper. “With this, there’s no room. She is not accusing him. Look at it. There’s no accusation in it anywhere. She is finishing a thought she has been having since about the fourth year, out loud, once, with her coat on, and then she is going home. He doesn’t get to react inside the sentence. That is the cruelty. Your mother built a sentence that doesn’t let him in, and the mark is how she did it.”

“You wanted the full stop,” I said, before I could stop myself. “In October. On day one.”

“I did.”

“You said the Spanish semicolon was a man announcing he’d been to university.”

“I did say that.” He did not look up from the page. “I was wrong in October. I’d rather be wrong in October than wrong on page two hundred and seventy-one.”

Our hands were both on the sheet. Mine flat to hold it, his with two fingers down beside the mark, and the outside edge of his hand was against the outside edge of mine from the knuckle to the wrist, which is about four inches of contact, and I did not move my hand, and he did not move his.

I am recording the measurement because measurement is the only thing I have been reliably good at since September.

It lasted, I would estimate, eleven seconds. Neither of us shifted. Neither of us made the small adjustment people make, the quarter-inch that turns an accident into something you have both agreed to ignore. We stood over a page in a dead woman’s study with our hands touching along one edge, arguing with her son about a piece of punctuation, and we did not move, and afterwards neither of us said one word about it.

· · ·Scene break

“You’re both wrong,” Renzo said, “and I can’t tell you why, and that is the worst part of my entire year.”

“Try,” I said.

“I wanted one page.” He had his hands on his knees. “I have read this book eleven times since September. She is understanding in it. She is fair. She is fair to the husband on every single page, she is fair to him when he is a coward, she is fair to him in Genoa with the toaster, and I wanted one page in it where my mother is just angry.” His voice went somewhere and came back. “One page. So I could have it.”

The gas in the pipes made the noise it makes in that flat.

And I did the thing I did next without deciding to do it, which is not an excuse, because I had been carrying the sheet in the outer pocket of my bag since the middle of October and there is no version of that which is an accident.

I put Giulia’s note in front of him. The back of page seventy-nine, in pencil, uphill.

E. — chiedigli perché ha imballato la cucina. Non lo sa nemmeno lui. Chiediglielo lo stesso.

Renzo read it. He read it three times, which is what everyone does with her handwriting, and then a fourth, which is not.

“E.,” he said.

“Me.”

“And the kitchen is—“ He looked up at Mateo, and then at me, and then, briefly and with something like horror, at the desk built for two people who argue about elbow room. “Page seventy-nine is about you.”

“Some of it. Not all of it.”

“How long have you had this.”

“Since October. He found it and handed it to me the same minute, which is more than I did with it.” I kept my voice flat, which is a technique, and Renzo is thirty-four and not a fool. “I’m showing you because you asked for one page where she’s angry. That’s the closest thing in this house to your mother being angry, and it isn’t anger. It’s an instruction. She wasn’t angry at the end, Renzo, she was busy. She spent the last year of her life taking the well-written parts out.”

He put the sheet down on the desk very carefully, the way you put down something belonging to someone else.

“Keep the semicolon,” he said.

“Renzo—“

“Keep it. You’re right and I don’t like it and I’m not going to have you sitting here agreeing with me out of politeness, it’s the one thing in this that would actually insult her.” He stood up and got his coat off the hook. “Query nine’s still open. And tell Morag I’ll go through the flat in Turin again, the whole of it, the wardrobes, and if it’s in a wardrobe I’ll ring you at whatever hour it is.”

At the door he stopped, with his back to us, which is how he does it.

“She took it out because it was true,” he said. “Whatever’s in it. Just so you both know what you’re looking for.”

Twenty-two steps, fast.

· · ·Scene break

We worked until six and got a page and a half, which was not the afternoon’s fault.

At the door, with my coat on and my bag on my shoulder and the light already off over his side of the desk, I said mine.

“Ho tenuto la mano ferma.”

I kept my hand still.

He did not translate it. He did not say it back to me in Spanish, where there is a verb for it that would have been better and that I would have had to listen to. He did not ask which hand or when or what I meant, and he knew what I meant, and I knew that he knew, because he had gone very slightly grey around the mouth.

What he did was put his hand back down on the desk, flat, in the place where it had been that afternoon, on the left-hand side of the page, where the light from my lamp would have fallen on it if my lamp had still been on.

And he left it there, and did not look up, and I went down the stone stair into the dark counting the treads, which is his habit and has never been mine, and there are twenty-two of them, and I got to fourteen and had to stand still on the turn by the window for a while before I could do the rest.