What the Wife Says

By the second week of October we had a working method, which is a thing I had not expected and would have denied wanting.

It went like this. I arrived at nine and he arrived at ten to nine and pretended he had only just sat down. There were two coffees on the desk by five past, his black and mine with the milk in first, which is not how anybody in this country makes coffee and which he has never once got wrong. We read the Italian aloud, alternate paragraphs. We worked until half past one, when he would stand up and say “food” in the tone of a man raising a point of order, and I would say “one more sentence,” and we would do four more, and then eat sandwiches on the window seat with the box between us like a chaperone.

Renzo’s queries came on Sunday nights, numbered, ruthless, and right about one time in three, which is a far better strike rate than any editor I have worked with and I have told him so, in an email, which he has not answered.

And twice a day one of us would find one of her notes.

p. 58. Corrado is lying here and he does not know it yet. Do not let him sound like a man who knows.

p. 61. This word is from my mother. Leave it strange. She was strange.

p. 66. Whichever of you is reading this at six in the evening: go home. The book will still be dead tomorrow.

We had done sixty-eight pages. We were going to be finished with a month to spare, and I had begun to have the specific, treacherous thought that it might be a pleasant winter.

On the Tuesday he said, of a sentence of mine, “That’s less words than she has,” and I said, “Fewer,” before I had made any decision to say it, and he put his pen down and looked at the ceiling for a while.

“Eleven years,” he said.

“Eleven years of you doing it on purpose.”

“I do it on purpose because you do it on reflex. It’s the only reliable trick I have.” He picked the pen up again. “The line’s still too short. You’ve saved four words and lost the exhaustion.”

He was right, which is the thing about working with him that nobody warned me about when I was twenty-nine and delighted. He is right at a rate of about one time in three, exactly like her son, and the one time in three is always the time I have already privately suspected and gone past at speed.

Chapter three of La casa a due porte is forty pages long and it is the one everyone will talk about when the book comes out, and it took us four days to get into it properly. It is set eleven months after the husband has gone. The wife, Nella, has a sister who is a great deal more forgiving than she is and who has come to Turin for three days to be helpful, and the chapter is mostly the two of them in a flat, being scrupulously polite about a man.

On the Thursday we reached page seventy-nine, where the sister finally asks the question she has come nine hundred kilometres to ask, which is whether Nella has forgiven him.

Mateo was reading. He had the page at the angle he uses, half-turned to the lamp, and he read the sister’s question and then Nella’s answer straight through in Italian without stopping, the way you do the first time.

Non c’è niente da perdonare. C’è solo l’anno in cui ha imballato la cucina senza chiedermi quale tazza fosse la mia.

There is nothing to forgive. There is only the year he packed the kitchen without asking me which cup was mine.

He put the page down and started to say something about the verb — imballare, to box things up, which is a word for removals men and for fragile goods, and he had got as far as “it’s the word you’d use for a shipment, so the register is deliberately—“

And then he stood up, mid-clause, with the sentence still open in the air, and walked out of the room.

Not quickly. That is the part I keep returning to. He did not storm. He pushed the chair back to the correct distance from the desk, which he has done in every room in every country I have ever lived in with him, and he went out through the door into the hall and I heard the front door of the flat open and not close, and then his feet on the stone going down, unhurried, like a man who has remembered an appointment.

I sat where I was.

I would like to record that my first feeling was compassion. My first feeling was the small vicious triumph of a woman who has been waiting eleven days for the other person to be the one who flinches, and it lasted about two seconds, and I was ashamed of it for the rest of the afternoon and am still ashamed of it now.

The second thing I felt was vertigo, because of the cup.

Here is what nobody knows. Three years ago, in a flat in Marchmont, with a folder open on a table, I read a passage of Mateo’s about a man packing a kitchen into boxes without once asking his wife which pieces she wanted. I tightened three sentences of it. I left the fourth alone. It has been in a locked drawer ever since, and the only two people who have ever read it are the man who wrote it and the woman who could not improve on it.

And here it was on page seventy-nine of a novel by a woman who had been dead since September, in her own words, in her own rhythm, with a cup in it.

I sat in that study and worked through it like a problem, because that is what I do instead of the other available activities. Coincidence: possible. Kitchens get packed. Marriages end in kitchens — it is practically a genre, and Giulia had written four novels about marriages and had a great deal of material of her own. She had been in our flat. She had seen the kitchen. She had seen both of us in the year the marriage ended, and she had seen us two years before that, in a February that neither of us has ever described out loud and that I still cannot put into a sentence.

She had watched him pack. She might simply have watched him pack.

That was a perfectly sufficient explanation, and I did not believe it, and I could not say one word about why not without opening a drawer in Marchmont in front of him.

So I did the only thing left.

I translated the line.

There is a way to do it that I have been doing for sixteen years, and it is not lying. It is not even softening, exactly. It is what you do when a sentence is a knife: you keep the blade, and you put a small amount of air around it, a simply here, a rhythm smoothed there, an “all that’s left is” instead of “there is only”. The reader gets the fact and does not get the temperature. Every translator alive knows how to do it. We call it judgement.

I sat with my pencil over the page for a long time.

Then I wrote it out straight.

There is nothing to forgive. There is only the year he packed the kitchen without asking me which cup was mine.

No simply. No softening of soltanto into something English and apologetic. The short, plain, ugly sentence with the same number of beats as hers, landing on the same word she landed on, and the cup at the end where she put it, because she put it there on purpose and the whole sentence is built to arrive at it.

I read it back twice. It is the best sentence I have written this year and it cost me nothing at all, which is how you know a thing was sitting there fully formed, waiting for you to stop managing it.

I did not type it. I wrote it on a clean sheet in my own hand, which he has known for eleven years, and I put it on his side of the desk, in the groove, under his pencil, where he would see it before he sat down.

Then I looked at the margin of page seventy-nine, because by then I had learned to, and it was empty. In forty pages of her handwriting, on the one page in the book that had put him out of the room, Giulia had written nothing at all.

“Fine,” I said out loud, to a cardigan on a chair. “Be like that.”

· · ·Scene break

And then I went after him.

I want to be exact about this, because I have spent three years being the woman who does not, and it has been a considerable investment.

For three years the arrangement has been that he leaves rooms and I let him. He left one in February five years ago and I let him; he left our flat, eventually, and I helped, in the sense that I did not once say the word stay, and I have had a great deal of time since then to admire the precision of my own restraint. There is a version of that afternoon in which I sit at the desk with my beautiful accurate sentence and wait to see how long he takes, and it is available to me, and it is comfortable, and it is the whole of my character.

I put my pencil in the groove and went out onto the stair.

The stair in that building is stone, and it turns twice, and at the first turn there is a tall window with a sill deep enough to sit on, looking out at the back greens and somebody’s washing giving up in the rain. The light on it that afternoon was the colour of weak tea.

He was three steps below the turn, standing, one hand on the iron rail, not going anywhere. He had not taken his coat. He had not gone out into the street. He had come down twelve steps of a stone stair and stopped, like a man who has left a room and then discovered that leaving the room was the entire plan.

He heard me and did not turn round.

“I’m going to come back up in a minute,” he said. “I’m not walking out on the work.”

“I know.”

“Give me ten minutes and I’ll do chapter three with you. All forty pages. I’m not going to make you carry—“

“Mateo.”

He stopped.

I came down to the turn and sat on the window sill, which put my head roughly level with his, and I did not say any of the six or seven graceful things that had assembled themselves on the way down the first flight. I have a whole staircase of those. I could have given him one every step.

I said: “Did you leave the room because of the line, or because of me?”

The rain went along the window behind me. Somewhere above us the door of the flat was still standing open, and I could hear, faintly, the noise the sash makes in that study when the wind gets behind it, a sound like somebody putting a book down in another room.

He turned round then. He looked up at me from three steps below, which is not a position he has ever willingly occupied in his life, and whatever was happening in his face was happening a long way behind it.

“Ask me that in Spanish,” he said, “and I’ll answer it.”