Non Mio

The archive in Turin wrote back to Morag on the twenty-eighth of January. Four lines. Boxes seven, eight and nine had been inventoried on receipt in the spring, the inventory was enclosed, and no item in it corresponded to the description supplied. The inventory ran to two pages and I read all of it twice, because I have been wrong about a document before.

Renzo did the flat in Turin in the last week of the month. He did it properly: three days, both wardrobes, the hall cupboard with the skis in it that nobody in that family has ever used, the cistern of the lavatory, which he reported in exactly the tone he had used for the wardrobes. He rang me at ten past ten on the Wednesday night to say there was nothing, and then stayed on the line a while without saying anything, which from Renzo Ferro is an embrace.

That left one place in the world nobody had looked in, and it had been eleven inches from Mateo’s left knee since the first of October.

The desk has two banks of drawers, one under each place, because Giulia had it built for two people and then used it alone for eleven years, which is the sort of arrangement she found funny. The upper drawers on both sides hold the ordinary sediment: paper clips, three pairs of reading glasses, a letter from a bank in 2004. The bottom drawer on the right is her working notebooks.

Nobody had opened it because opening it is not work. The codicil gives us the manuscript, and a woman’s working notebooks are the place where she is not yet any good, which is the one part of herself a writer does not leave lying about on purpose. Morag ruled on it in a sentence — estate property, Renzo’s consent required, ring him — and his consent came back at eleven the same night, with no greeting and no signature.

Read them. Tell me if she says anything about me.

I went in on the Saturday morning on my own. Mateo offered to come; I said I would rather start it alone; he agreed about a quarter of a second faster than a man agrees to a thing he has no feeling about, and I noticed the quarter of a second, and got on the bus.

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There are nine of them. Black oilcloth, squared paper, the ones she bought forty at a time from a shop on Via Po and gave away to students when she was pleased with them. On the front of each, in white ink, a year and a letter.

I learned her system at twenty-four in a flat with no heating, and it never changed. The last two pages of a notebook are the index, in her shorthand, and the index is not optional. She used to say that a notebook without an index is a diary, and that she did not keep a diary, because a diary is a letter to a person who will definitely read it and the person is you.

I sat in her chair, because her son had told me to read them and there was nowhere else to sit, and I read for three hours with the lamp on and the rain doing nothing much outside.

They are wonderful and they are largely unusable. Shopping lists. A page of insults in dialect, collected, with attributions. The lemon tree four times, getting shorter each time. A note on the inside cover of the 2021 one that says, in English, stop showing off, you are sixty and nobody is coming.

The index of the last notebook has a page I was not expecting, and the page has a heading, and the heading is NON MIO.

Not mine. It is a list of the things she took.

la macchina del caffè — mia madre, 1971. Il cappotto era suo. The espresso machine, her mother, 1971. The coat was hers.

il tostapane — R. The toaster in Genoa belongs to her son, and I have not asked him about it and I do not intend to.

And then, six lines from the bottom, in the uphill hand, with the page reference out in the margin where she always put page references:

la cucina — M., quaderno II, p. 60. → 79.

I put the notebook down on the desk and sat with my hands flat on either side of it.

Quaderno II. Notebook two. He keeps his working notebooks in A5 squared with grey card covers and he has bought them from the same shop in Madrid since he was twenty-six, and he had three of them at the back of a drawer and lost them in a move, and I know that because he told me so in the year we were still telling each other things.

She had them. She had them at some point, in her hands, long enough to read as far as page sixty of the second one and take a paragraph off it, and she wrote down where she had taken it from because she wrote everything down, and then she put it in the mouth of a woman in a flat in Turin and left the margin of that page empty.

I sat there and did the arithmetic I have been refusing to do since the tenth of October, when a man walked out of that room mid-clause over a sentence about a cup.

There is a version of that paragraph in a locked drawer in Marchmont. I have had it for three years. I have never told him how I came by it, and I have never told him I have it, and on the tenth of October I sat at that desk and translated his own sentence straight back at him without one word of air around it and let him think it was a professional decision.

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The letter is the last entry on the page.

la lettera — M., quaderno III, in fondo, dietro l’elastico. A E. Non spedita.

The letter — M., notebook three, at the back, behind the elastic. To E. Not sent.

And then, in capitals, which she used about twice a decade: NON PRESA. Non si prende.

Not taken. You don’t take that.

Underneath, in English, because she wrote English when she did not want to be answerable, there are two lines. The first is struck through with a single stroke, not scribbled over, so that it can still be read, which she did on purpose.

She would have wanted this one sent.

And under it, written again, with no line through it, the same six words, and then:

I am not writing down what it says. It isn’t mine to say. If he never says it I will have been wrong about both of them, and I would rather be wrong than be the postman.

I read that page for a long time. The rain got on with its afternoon. At some point the radiator did the thing it does at half past two, which is to make a noise like a man clearing his throat two rooms away, and I jumped.

So. There is a letter, in his hand, addressed to me, from some year I cannot date, which he did not send, and which Giulia read and did not send either, and which was in a box in a rented flat in Stockbridge on the twenty-fifth of January while I stood at a door and told him I had kept my hand still.

Here is what was available to me that afternoon. I am going to set all of it down, because I have been giving myself credit for four days and I would like the record to show the going rate.

I could have asked him. Six words: Giulia’s notebooks say there’s a letter. He would have gone grey around the mouth and then he would have told me, because he is not a liar; he is a man who arranges the order in which things become true, which is different and worse.

I could have gone through Morag. Giulia’s annotations are her literary property; there is an entirely respectable argument that the estate has an interest in every page in that box and that the executor is entitled to a schedule of contents. I drafted that email. I got as far as Dear Morag, a question about the scope of the estate’s interest in and then sat and looked at it.

That is the thing nobody tells you about being good with words. You can always find the sentence that lets you do the thing. There is one for every occasion, and I have never in my life failed to find one.

I deleted the draft. Then I emptied the deleted items, because I know myself.

I am aware that waiting is what I have done with him for eleven years, and that a woman who does nothing can always be described afterwards as patient. That was not this. Waiting because you would rather not be refused is cowardice with good posture. This was the other thing, and I only know the difference because it was so much worse: I sat in that chair wanting to know, physically, the way you want water, and I understood that if I took it, it would be a thing I had extracted, and it would belong to me the way a confession belongs to the man asking the questions.

He has to hand it over. He has to be the one who opens his mouth. Otherwise, in ten years, in the version of this I would tell at somebody’s dinner table, I am the woman who got it out of him.

I put the notebooks back in the drawer in the order they came out. I kept the last one, for the NON MIO page, because it is a working note on the source of page seventy-nine and it belongs in the file, which is true, and which is also exactly the kind of sentence I have just spent four hundred words despising.

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On the Monday I told him about the page before the coffee had cooled, because I had decided on the bus that I was going to do it standing up with my coat still on.

“She took the kitchen from you,” I said. “Page seventy-nine. It’s in her index, in the last notebook, on a page headed not mine, with your initial and a page reference. Notebook two, page sixty.”

He did not sit down either. He stood on his side of the desk with a cup in each hand and looked at the notebook where I had put it, open, facing him.

“Yes,” he said.

“You knew.”

“Since the twenty-fifth of January.” He put the cups down, hers with the milk in first, his black. “I was going to tell you when we finished the book.”

“Of course you were.”

“I’m agreeing with you. I’m not defending it. I had a date in my head and the date was March, and I know what that is, and I have not been able to make myself move it.” He turned the notebook round with two fingers and read the line again, which is not necessary with a line that short. “That’s her doing arithmetic on me in pencil.”

“There’s one more entry under it,” I said.

He waited.

“I’m not going to tell you what it says.”

His face did something very small.

“I want to be clear that I am not doing it the other way round,” I said. “I’m not going to say nothing and let you find out in June from a solicitor. I have read a thing that is yours. I am telling you that I read it, I am telling you that I am not going to repeat it, and if you want to know what is on that page you can pick the notebook up. It’s on the desk. I’m not standing in front of it.”

He looked at the notebook for about four seconds. I counted, which is a thing I have got from him and intend to give back at some point.

“No,” he said.

“No?”

“Not out of your hand.”

And we stood there on either side of a desk built for two people who argue about elbow room, having said more in ninety seconds than in the week before it, and then I took the folded sheet out of the inside pocket of my bag, where it had been since the second of October, and put it in the groove.

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“That’s the dedication page,” he said.

“Yes.”

“You have had that in your bag for four months.”

“Yes. It has been in six countries.” I sat down. “Do you want to know what it says, or do you want to do the part where you tell me what I did?”

“The first one.”

So I turned the lamp round to rake the light across the pencil, and read it to him.

Eleven characters. Two full stops. In the middle, the mark that is not quite an ampersand, which she used for and, and which I had checked in November against an unsent card in folder four.

“A E. & M.,” I said. “That’s the first six. She drops the vowels out of anything she has written more than twice. The last five characters are one word.”

“Which is.”

“Ditevelo.”

He put both hands on the back of his chair.

“Say it to each other,” I said. “One word in Italian. Plural imperative, with the reciprocal pronoun and the object pronoun stuck on the end of it, which is a thing Italian can do and English cannot, so English needs five words and a raised voice to get there. She wrote it on the dedication page of her last novel in a shorthand with one living reader, she put it exactly where a dedication sits, and she knew the copy in a solicitor’s file would come out blank.”

He did not say anything for a while. Then: “Why did you take it?”

“Because it is an instruction,” I said. “Because it is going on the front of a book in three languages with my initial on it. And because if I had put it on this desk on the second of October, you would have arranged it. You would have said something correct about the estate and the front matter and whether Renzo ought to be consulted, and I would have let you, and by Christmas it would have been a file.”

“Yes,” he said. “I would have.”

“I know.”

“I’m not arguing. I’m saying yes.”

He sat down. I left the sheet in the groove between us, face up, the eleven characters towards the ceiling, and we did nine pages of chapter nineteen, and at half past one he said “food” as a point of order and I said “one more sentence” and we did four.

We kept the rule that week. I want that on the record, because of what came later in the month. We said one each, every day, and both of them were small — the kind you can say with your hands busy, over a page, without looking up.

Her instruction stayed in the groove where the pencils go until we put our coats on. It faced upwards the whole afternoon, and neither of us did what it said.