The Empty Dedication

The front matter took us all morning and we did not settle a single thing, and I would still call it the best morning of the project so far, which tells you something about the work and possibly about me.

The title page said La casa a due porte. Nothing else. No epigraph, which I had privately been dreading, because Giulia’s taste in epigraphs ran to obscure regional poets and one year of quoting weather reports.

“The House with Two Doors,” Elodie said, and then, immediately, “no.”

“You’ve had it for four seconds.”

“I’ve had it for four seconds and I already know that English hears ‘two doors’ as an opportunity. Choices, options, escape routes, a man at an estate agent’s window. The Italian doesn’t say that. The Italian says the house is hard to keep warm.”

“A house that cannot be shut,” I said.

“That’s closer. That’s not a title.” She wrote both down anyway. “What does yours do?”

And here is where my language did something I could not fix, which I had known since roughly the moment Morag read the codicil aloud.

“Mine has a problem,” I said. “Casa con dos puertas. There’s a proverb. A house with two doors is hard to guard. Every Spanish reader over the age of thirty will hear the whole of it behind the title, and the proverb is a comedy — it’s about husbands failing to keep track of their wives, farce, doors, people hiding in the wrong room. If I use the obvious words, the book announces itself as a joke for the first twenty pages.”

Elodie put her chin on her hand and looked at me with her entire attention, which is a specific and dangerous climate.

“Did she know that?”

“Giulia knew everything.”

“Then she chose a due porte in Italian, which doesn’t carry it, knowing that the Spanish would.” She sat back. “So the Spanish reader gets a joke the Italian reader doesn’t, and it’s a joke about a marriage that can’t be kept shut, and it curdles by chapter three. That’s not an accident, Mateo. That’s a woman setting a trap for you specifically.”

“Or it is an accident and you are doing the thing where you promote her to God.”

“She spent eight months drafting a codicil about punctuation.”

I could not answer that.

We put it on a list. The list is a page at the back of my notebook headed PENDING, and the first entry on it is the title, and it will still be the last entry on it in March, I suspect, because it turns out the memorandum Morag filed does not help us here: the alternating final cut runs by chapter, and a title is not a chapter.

“I’ll ring her,” I said.

“You will not ring her.”

“It is a genuine gap in the procedure.”

“It is a title. We decide it at the end, when we know what the book is.” She took the pencil out of the groove and pointed it at me. “You are going to have to learn to live inside one unresolved thing at a time, or these six months will finish you.”

“I have lived inside unresolved things.”

“You have managed unresolved things,” Elodie said, not unkindly, not looking up, and went on to the next page, and I sat there for a moment with the particular quiet of a man who has been described accurately before eleven in the morning.

· · ·Scene break

The dedication page was the third sheet.

It was blank. That is what I saw first, and what I said out loud: “It’s blank, she hasn’t done it,” and I was already thinking ahead, in the way I do, to what we would tell the publisher, whether the estate could supply one, whether Renzo would want it, which of these was a decision and which was a question, and whether I could take the whole of it off Elodie’s desk and off her mind before she had finished her coffee.

Then she turned the page towards the lamp and it was not blank.

There was one line on it, down in the lower third where a dedication sits, in soft pencil, so faint that the photocopier in Morag’s office had missed it entirely on the file copy we had been reading from all week. Eleven characters. Two full stops. A mark in the middle that was not quite an ampersand.

It was not Italian, or not Italian as anyone else writes it. It was the private shorthand Giulia had used in her notebooks since the seventies, forty years of abbreviations that she had invented for speed and kept because they made her drafts unreadable to husbands, editors, and a series of increasingly frustrated research assistants.

I can read her print. I cannot read that. In eleven years I never learned more than about six of her symbols, and I had always privately regarded them as an affectation.

Elodie could read it. Elodie learned it at twenty-four, typing the woman’s drafts for pocket money in a flat in Turin with no heating, which is a fact I have heard at four separate dinner parties.

So I watched her read it.

I want to be accurate about the order of what happened, because I have gone over it since.

She leaned in. She read it — her lips did not move, but her eyes went along it once and then back to the beginning and along it again, the way you re-read a line that has come apart in your hands. Then the colour went out of her face in a way I have seen exactly twice before in my life, and both of those times were in a hospital.

“Tranquila,” I said, which was not a decision, and I had my hand halfway across the desk before I had any idea what it planned to do when it arrived.

“I’m fine.” She sat back. The page came with her.

“What does it say?”

“It’s nothing. It’s a note to herself.” Her voice had gone short and flat, all the long precise architecture of it collapsed into three-word rooms. “She did it constantly. Reminders. Page references. It’s a draft page, Mateo, she never finished the front matter.”

“It’s in the dedication position.”

“It’s in the middle of a blank page.”

“Elodie.”

“It’s nothing,” she said, in Italian, which is what happens to her when it is not nothing, and then she did something that took about a second and a half and that I will be thinking about for the rest of my life.

She slid the sheet off the pile, squared it against the desk, folded it once — folded a dead woman’s manuscript page, she who will not let me put a mug down on a photocopy — and put it in the inside pocket of the bag by her chair.

“I’ll type up a facsimile for the file,” she said. “We work from copies of the front matter anyway.”

And I said nothing.

I want to write that plainly, because everything else I could write about that moment would be an improvement on it. I sat in a chair two feet from my ex-wife, who had just gone white and taken a page out of the room, and I said nothing, and I did not say nothing because I was stunned, or because I am a gentleman, or because I was respecting her privacy, all three of which I offered myself in the following ninety seconds like a man handing round a plate of biscuits.

I said nothing because saying something would have required me to ask a question I could not control the answer to.

That is what it is. I have had three years and a solicitor’s worth of paperwork to think about my own character and I have arrived at one sentence: I do not withhold because I am cold. I withhold because if I ask, the answer arrives on its own schedule, in somebody else’s words, and then I am in the room with it.

What I did instead was work. I worked extremely well. We did another four pages that afternoon and two of them were difficult and I was, by any professional measure, an excellent collaborator for the rest of the day, and every so often I would look up and see the strap of her bag on the back of her chair and think: the page is in there, and then I would go back to the sentence I was doing and do it very well.

There is a month I do not use as a month. When it comes round in the year I refer to it by other things — the end of the tax quarter, the week the Madrid flat is cold — and my sister has noticed and has never once said so. I mention it here only because I recognised the shape of what Elodie did with that page. You take the thing, and you fold it, and you put it somewhere with a zip.

I am not qualified to be indignant about it. I am qualified to notice it, which is worse.

· · ·Scene break

Noor rang from Berlin at seven, while I was walking down the hill with my coat collar up and the rain coming sideways off the water.

“Are you translating a dead woman’s novel with your ex-wife,” she said, “or has Morag been lying to me for a fortnight?”

“Both are true.”

“How is it?”

“It is going well.”

There was a pause of the kind Noor Kassab has been deploying on me since we were twenty-eight, and which is more effective than most people’s shouting.

“I’m giving you one more go at that answer,” she said.

“It is going well and I am aware that this is a strange thing to be pleased about.” I stopped under the awning of a chemist’s because the rain had become a question of dignity. “We did five pages on Tuesday. We did a word on Tuesday that took her an hour and it was worth the hour. She caught a tense I would have left. I haven’t worked like that since—“

“Since.”

“Yes.”

“Good,” Noor said. “Now tell me something you’ve actually said to her.”

“We have said a great many things to each other. We’re translating a novel.”

“That is not what I asked, and you know exactly that it is not what I asked, which is why you answered it.” I heard her light something, which she has supposedly stopped doing. “Do you know what Giulia asked me, in the spring? She asked me whether I thought you two would do it. Not whether you could. Whether you would. I said yes because I am an optimist and I wanted her to eat something.”

“What would you say now?”

“I’d say you’ll do it,” Noor said. “I’d say you’ll do it beautifully and hand it in on time and go home to your separate flats, and in ten years one of you will find something in a drawer and it’ll take a week out of your life. I’m coming in December, by the way. I’ve told Renzo. He’s already sent me a numbered list.”

She rang off before I could organise a response, which is how she prefers to leave a conversation.

I stood under the awning for a while. Down the hill, the lights were on in the New Town in that regular, self-satisfied Georgian rhythm, and one of those windows was Giulia’s study, where a cardigan was still over the back of a chair, and where a desk built for two people who argue about elbow room had a list in my notebook on one side of it and, on the other, the ghost of a folded page.

Both of us were keeping something now.

Hers had gone into a bag at eleven in the morning, in front of me, and she had not troubled to hide the hiding, which is its own kind of message and which I did not yet know how to read. Mine was smaller and quieter and entirely voluntary. I had chosen it, deliberately, in a dead woman’s study on a Wednesday, and the whole of my defence was that I had not said anything at all.