Turin, Again

I have made this journey five times and I could do it in my sleep, and one year I more or less did.

The flight on the Thursday evening. The hotel two minutes from Porta Nuova, room six, because room six is always free in February. Then the eight fifty-two from the small platform at the end, twenty-two minutes, and eleven minutes uphill past a garage and a shuttered bar and a wall with the same piece of graffiti on it since 2019.

The gate is iron and it drags. There is a tap on the left with a green can chained to it that nobody has ever stolen. My grandmother is nine rows in, on the second terrace, where you can see the whole valley if you turn round, which nobody there is in a position to do.

At the foot of her stone there is another stone, about the size of a hardback book, set flush into the grass.

There is a date on it and nothing else. We never got as far as anything else.

I do the same things every year. I take the moss out of the numbers with my thumbnail, which takes about four minutes and which I could do faster with a brush, and I have never brought a brush. I fill the can and do my grandmother’s geraniums, because they are there and somebody should. I bring nothing. The first year I brought flowers and stood holding them for a long time and understood that I had brought them so that I would have something to do with my hands, and I have not brought anything since.

And then I stand there for about forty minutes and say nothing at all.

Five years of that. I have never once spoken in that place. I have composed, on that terrace, in two languages, several hundred sentences of very high quality, and I have never said one of them out loud, and I have always thought of that as the discipline of the thing. What it actually is, I have come to understand, is a woman doing her best work in an empty room.

The eighth of March, in Glasgow, eleven days before I was due back, I gave a paper on aspect in the Italian past tenses and it was good. On the fourteenth of February for five years I have stood on wet grass composing.

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I had been there about half an hour when the gate dragged.

I did not turn round, because people come. There is an old man who does the third terrace on Fridays and a woman with a folding chair.

Then the footsteps stopped a long way short of where footsteps stop, and I knew from the distance who it was before I turned, because it was exactly the distance at which a person stops when he has decided in advance not to arrive.

He was on the path six or seven stones back with his coat buttoned and no bag.

“I am going to tell you how I knew before I say anything else,” he said. “Your diary is on the desk. It has been open on that desk since September. The fourteenth has T. written across it and nothing else, in the way you write a thing you do not want to look at, and I read it on Wednesday night and I did not ask you, and I have flown here off the back of a page I read without permission. If you would rather I had asked, tell me now and I will say it back to you as many times as you want to hear it.”

“All right.”

“And I would like to know whether I can come up there,” he said, “or whether you would rather I waited at the gate. Either is fine. The gate is fine. I have a coat.”

The valley did what it does in February, which is nothing, for a long way.

“Come,” I said.

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He came and stood beside me and looked at the stone and did not say anything for a while, and did not fill the silence with the four available remarks, all of which I could have written out for him.

“I have never been here,” he said eventually.

“No.”

“What do you do?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I clean the numbers. I water my grandmother. Then I stand here for about forty minutes and I don’t say anything.”

“Can I clean the other side?”

I said yes, and he crouched down on the wet grass in a good coat and went at the far half of the date with his thumbnail, badly at first and then properly, and I did the near half, and it took a few minutes, and neither of us spoke while we were doing it. It is the only thing anybody has ever helped me do there.

When he stood up he said, “Was there a name?”

“We never got that far.”

“I know,” he said. “I wanted to be told, not to remember.”

And then I said the thing I had been carrying up that hill since the train, and I said it badly, which I am glad about, because I had a better version and the better version had been available since about Glasgow.

“Five years ago I asked you in a corridor to come in with me,” I said. “You said no. I want you to know that today was the same question and you have already answered it.”

He did not say anything to that at all. His jaw did something. After a moment he put his hand flat on top of my grandmother’s stone, which is what people in his family do, and left it there, and we stood.

At twenty past eleven I said, “That’s the forty minutes,” and he said, “Then we go,” and we went down through the gate that drags.

On the path I asked him about Madrid.

“I did Thursday,” he said. “It went well. I rang Amalia at midnight and told her I could not do the Friday or the Saturday and that Ximena would have to be interviewed by somebody who has actually read her. She asked whether it was a family matter and I said yes.” He held the gate. “It is the first time in three years I have used that phrase accurately.”

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There is a café in the village below the cemetery with four tables and a television on a bracket. I have been going in there on the fourteenth of February for five years and drinking a coffee standing up like a woman waiting for a bus.

We sat down. The man came over with his pad.

“Per lei il—“ Mateo said, and stopped, with his hand still up.

I watched him do it. It took about a second and a half. I have thought about that second and a half a good deal since, and what I think is that it is the only moment in the whole of this in which I actually saw a habit break, as opposed to hearing about one afterwards.

“No,” he said. “I’m sorry.” And then, to me, in English, in the plainest voice he has: “What do you want?”

Nobody has asked me that in a café in eleven years. He has been ordering for me since Bologna, and I have been ordering for him, and we have both been right every single time, which is the entire problem and which is also, I want to record, genuinely lovely and which I am not going to pretend I did not enjoy.

“A coffee,” I said. “And one of those things with the apricot in it, which I have never once had here because I have always been standing up.”

“Then have two,” he said, and turned to the man, and said, “Lei prende—“ and stopped again, and put his hand down, and looked at me with something close to despair, and I laughed for the first time in eight days, in a café, in front of a stranger with a pad.

I ordered mine. I asked him what he wanted. He told me, and it was not what I would have ordered for him, and it arrived and it was better.

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Afterwards we walked down to the bus stop the long way, by the wall where you can see the road going off towards the hills, and I stopped, and he stopped.

Eight days. Neither of us had said a true sentence to the other since the sixth of February, unless you count the Wednesday evening, when we said several at volume in front of a man in a coat with the numbers wrong, which I do not think is what we meant on the stair. Neither of us had mentioned the lapse, then or since, and neither of us has mentioned it to this day, which is how a rule made on a staircase works when both people want it to go on existing.

“Mi manchi,” I said.

Two words. The first is not a subject; it is me, in the case Italian keeps for the person a thing is done to. The verb belongs to him. You are missing from me. The language does not permit the other arrangement; you cannot say it the English way in Italian, with yourself at the front of the sentence doing the missing, tidily, as an activity.

In November, in a reading room, with a librarian at the end of the table, I had given him the whole history of that verb and gone round the two words themselves, and he had noticed me go round them and laid his pencil flat on the table parallel to the edge and said nothing, and I had been grateful and furious for about four months.

He did not translate it. He did not give it back to me in Spanish, where they have the same construction and where he could have done it better.

He said: “I’m not going to translate that.”

“I know.”

“I am going to say what I want, though, and I would like to do it without any arrangements in it, so it is going to be badly organised.” He put his hands in his coat pockets and then took them out again. “I want to be where you are. I want to be in the room when things happen to you instead of hearing the summary. Tonight I want to have dinner with you and I want to stay in Turin tomorrow, and I am not deciding anything about March on a road above a bus stop, and neither are you, and I want you to know now that I am going to want to. And I want to kiss you.” He stopped. “That is four things and I have said them in the wrong order.”

“It’s the right order,” I said. “You can’t say the fourth one first.”

“I want a yes or a no out loud,” he said. “In whichever language you want. If it is no, we walk down to the bus and I will not raise it again, and Monday is Monday.”

“Sí,” I said. “And yes. Both of them, so that there is no question about the grammar.”

Then he kissed me, on a road above a bus stop outside a village that I have been coming to alone in February for five years, with the wall at my back and his hand cold against my jaw, and I found that I had nothing whatsoever to say about it in any language, which has now happened to me twice in eight days after not happening once in thirty-eight years.

The bus was at ten past one. We were not on it.

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I rang my mother from the platform at the little station.

“Stai mangiando?”

“I’ve eaten. Mamma, I’m in Turin.”

“I know you’re in Turin,” she said. “You are in Turin in February.”

“I’m going to come on Sunday for lunch, if that suits you.” I watched a man wheel a trolley of parcels the length of the platform and back again for no reason I could establish. “I’m not going to tell you it’s work.”

There was a pause on the line of the sort I invented.

“E lui?”

“Mateo is here,” I said. “He came this morning.”

The pause went on a little longer. Somewhere in her kitchen the tap ran and stopped.

“Then bring him on Sunday,” my mother said, “and I will make the thing with the peppers, which he likes,” and rang off before I could say anything at all about the fact that she had just said his name, in her own kitchen, out loud, for the first time since the decree.

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The hotel gave him room four. The girl put the wooden fob on the counter as though November had not happened.

We ate at the place behind the station with the tables too close together, and we each ordered our own food, and it was a catastrophe: I chose badly and he chose worse, and neither of us mentioned it for eleven minutes, and then he said, “This is very bad,” and I said, “It’s extremely bad,” and we ate it.

Then the tram, and the stone stairs of that hotel, and the corridor with the window at the end that does not open and the runner down the middle the colour of old wine.

At my door I turned round with the key in my hand.

“Come up,” I said, and then heard it. “That is not a question. I am asking you a question. Do you want to come into my room tonight?”

“Yes,” he said. “I want to be exact about two things and then I will stop sounding like a solicitor. If you change your mind at any point tonight — any point at all, at the door, in an hour — you say so, and that is the end of it, and there is nothing to discuss in the morning and nothing to manage. The same goes for me. ¿De acuerdo?”

“D’accordo.”

“Say the rest of it,” he said. “You have a condition. I can hear it from here.”

“I have two.” I put the key down on the little table by the door so that my hands were empty. “I want tonight. I don’t want a decision about March tonight, and I don’t want you lying awake at four o’clock in room four building one and bringing it to me in the morning with dates in it.”

“I will want to build one.”

“I know you will.”

“I’m telling you in advance that I will want to,” he said, “and that I am not going to, and that you can ask me in the morning whether I did.”

“I will ask you in the morning whether you did.”

“Bien.” He was smiling, which he does about four times a year. “And the second condition?”

“There isn’t one,” I said. “I said two because I have never in my life gone into a room without a list.”

In November two doors had shut in that corridor within about four seconds of each other, and I had counted them, and written the number down.

That night one door shut, and I did not count anything at all.