En Español

I had come down twelve steps of that stair and stopped, and I had left the door of the flat standing open above me, which I noticed at about step nine and did not go back to correct. There is a version of me that closes doors quietly behind himself on the way out of a difficult afternoon. I have been that man for three years and I am very good at it, and I stood on a cold stone stair in the New Town with my hand on an iron rail and found that I had walked out of a room and left it open behind me, which is not walking out. It is standing in a stairwell where you can still be reached.

Then her feet on the stone above. Not fast. She came down the first flight the way she walks anywhere, as if the floor has been checked.

I had already told her to ask me in Spanish. She had put the question to me in English, straight, with no architecture on it at all — did you leave the room because of the line, or because of me — and I had said ask me that in Spanish and I’ll answer it, and I had said it the way a man puts a chair under a door handle. It was not a challenge. It was a lock with a key in it that I was fairly sure she would not pick up.

Because I knew what she would do next, which was nothing. I knew it the way you know a language. She would sit on that sill and give me two seconds of silence and then one immaculate English sentence with a joke in it, and we would go back up and finish chapter three, and that would be the end of the only honest question anybody had asked in that flat since September.

And I knew, as well, that if she did not do the sensible thing — if she tried — I knew which words she would reach for, because I had listened to her reach for them for eleven years at other people’s dinner tables. I knew which of them would be wrong. I could have written them down, on the stair, in the order she was going to say them.

She sat on the window sill with the rain coming down behind her, and she breathed in once, and she opened her mouth, and what came out of it was Spanish.

“¿Saliste de la habitación por la línea,” she said, “o por yo?”

Two mistakes, and I heard both of them land, and I will be hearing them when I am eighty.

La línea, which is what a translator says when she is still thinking in English: a line of verse, a line of text, a line on a form. The word for what Giulia had written is la frase. Elodie knows that. Elodie has known that since she was nineteen, and under pressure her whole beautiful apparatus reached across into the wrong language and took the nearest shape.

And por yo. Which is not Spanish. Which is not anything. Por mí is what a person says — because of me, for my sake, on my account, the form you use when you are the one a thing is done for. Por yo is the subject pronoun, the I that acts, the I that decides and packs and leaves, jammed into a slot that was built for the other kind.

My ex-wife, who is one of the four best readers of a sentence I have ever met, came down a stone stair and asked me whether I had walked out because of her, and could not put herself in the case of a person that something happens to.

“Cariño,” I said.

It was out before I had any vote in it. I heard it arrive in the stairwell and I watched it reach her, and neither of us did anything about it, which is the only reason I am able to write it down now.

Then I answered her, because I had said I would.

“Las dos cosas,” I said. Both. “The line, because she wrote it about me, and she knew she was writing it about me, and that is what I was doing out here. And you, because I knew exactly what you were doing up there while I stood on this step — you were sitting with that sentence deciding whether to put a little air around it. That’s the part I couldn’t be in the room for.”

She looked at me for a long moment.

“Okay,” she said.

That was all of it. Four sentences, if you count generously and do not count the word that escaped, and the last one was in English and had two syllables. Three years of solicitors’ letters and forwarded post and a funeral where I organised the flowers, and the whole honest conversation, when it finally happened, was four sentences long and took place on a stair.

She did not cry. She did not say any of the seven things I had braced for on the way down. She sat on that sill with her coat on and looked at me with an expression I had not seen since long before the end, which was, I think, relief that she had not been managed.

“I can’t do five more months of this,” she said. “I mean it administratively. I can’t do five months of standing in stairwells.”

“No.”

“So what do we do? Because the veto clause doesn’t cover it and neither does your memorandum, and I will not spend the winter working out from the way you square a page whether you’ve had a bad morning.”

And I, being who I am, made a rule.

I am aware of it. I made a rule on a stair, out loud, within ninety seconds of the first true thing I had said to her in three years, and the whole of my method was on display: the man who cannot say a feeling without first building a small machine that requires him to.

“One a session,” I said. “One sentence that’s true. Not about the book. At any point in the day, whenever it comes, in whatever language it arrives in. The other one doesn’t have to answer it.”

She thought about it, which is the thing about her. Anyone else would have said yes to get off the stair.

“One more condition,” she said. “And the other one doesn’t translate it.”

“Doesn’t translate it how?”

“Doesn’t translate it at all. Not back to me, not out loud, not on paper. If I say something to you in Italian you don’t give me the English. You don’t improve it. You don’t check you’ve understood.” She had her hands flat on the sill either side of her, and she said the rest of it carefully, the way you carry something across a room. “Because if you translate it, it becomes work, and I am extremely good at work, and I will spend the rest of the afternoon fixing what I said instead of having said it.”

“Agreed.”

“Say it back so I know you’ve heard the whole thing.”

“One true sentence per session, in whichever language it comes, and the other does not translate it back.” I put my hand out — not to her, to the rail, three steps down, holding on to a piece of iron in a building that was not mine. “Written nowhere. Not in Morag’s file.”

“God, no.”

“Nowhere at all.”

“That’s the only part of this arrangement that isn’t in a solicitor’s cabinet,” Elodie said, “which I imagine is why it’s the only part I believe in,” and she stood up off the sill and went back up the stairs, and I gave it a minute and followed her, because we had thirty-one pages of chapter three left and the afternoon was not over.

On my side of the desk, weighted under my own pencil, was a sheet of paper with one sentence on it in her handwriting.

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

No softening. Nothing put around it. The same beats as the Italian, landing on the same word, with the cup at the end where Giulia had built the whole sentence to arrive.

I read it standing up, with my coat still over my arm. Then I sat down and put it in the file, in order, page seventy-nine of three hundred and eleven, and I said, “This is right,” and she said, “I know,” and we did four more pages before the light went.

· · ·Scene break

The next morning she was there before me, which had not happened once.

“Don’t,” she said, without looking up.

“I haven’t said anything.”

“You were going to note the time. You do it with your phone face down and you think it’s discreet, and it is not discreet, it is the least discreet thing a man has ever done in a room with another person.”

“It’s a habit.”

“It’s a tic, and Giulia is going to have written something about it on page two hundred, and I want you to know now that when we get there I am going to read it out slowly.”

I turned my phone over and left it that way, and she made a small noise of satisfaction, and we started on page eighty.

We did nine pages that day. Nine is our record and I do not expect to see it again, because chapter three is the easy kind of hard: every sentence in it is a knife and none of them is complicated. Nella’s sister leaves. Nella stays in the flat. The chapter ends with her making coffee for one person on purpose, and it took us forty minutes to decide how much ceremony the word apposta is allowed to have in English, and about four minutes to decide the equivalent question in Spanish, and Elodie made a remark about Spanish that I am not going to record.

It was at page eighty-four that I turned the leaf the wrong way.

The sheets in Giulia’s copy are typed on one side only; you learn after a week to turn them with the flat of your hand. I turned page seventy-nine over, looking for a pencil correction Elodie thought she had seen bleeding through the paper, and there was a note on the back of it. On the reverse. Where neither of us had looked, because nobody had looked at the back of a blank sheet in sixty-eight pages.

It was in Italian, in pencil, in the appalling uphill hand.

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

E. — ask him why he packed the kitchen. He doesn’t know either. Ask him anyway.

I sat with that for a moment. It was addressed to her. It was on the back of the page that had put me out of the room the day before, which meant that on Thursday, while I stood in the stairwell, the answer to the question she had come down to ask me had been lying face down on the desk between us the entire time.

There are three or four things a man can do with that.

He can put the page back the way it was, which takes a second and a half, and go on to page eighty-five, and say to himself that he will find a better moment for it, and then find no better moment between now and March. I know that road. I have a house on it.

I turned the sheet round and put it in front of her.

“Back of seventy-nine,” I said. “It’s yours. It’s got your initial on it.”

She read it twice. I watched her face do the small precise work it does — the pause where another person would gasp — and then she put her hand flat on the page, over Giulia’s handwriting, and said, “She’s not going to let us do this politely, is she.”

“No.”

“All right.” She took her hand off the page. “Then I’ll have mine now, before I lose my nerve, and then we’re doing page eighty-five, because we are not finishing the day on sixty-four words.”

“That’s not how the rule works.”

“The rule doesn’t say who goes first. You wrote it on a staircase. It’s a badly drafted rule and you are in no position to complain.” She looked at the window and not at me, which I let her have. “Mi spaventa quanto è facile, questo, con te.”

It frightens me how easy this is, with you.

I did not say it back to her in English. I did not say it back to her in Spanish, which was harder, because Spanish had three ways to do it and two of them were better than the Italian and my hands actually moved towards the pencil.

I did not write it down. I did not check that I had understood, although I had, entirely, and I will be understanding it for some time.

What I did was put my pencil in the groove of the desk that a dead woman had built for two people who used to argue about elbow room, and leave it there, and say nothing at all, and after a moment she nodded once, as if I had answered her, and turned to page eighty-five.

Mine came at twenty past four, over a paragraph I had read three times without taking any of it in.

“I packed the kitchen on my own,” I said, “because deciding things was the only part of that year I was any good at, and I couldn’t stand to be no good at anything else in front of you.”

She put her pencil down in the groove next to mine.

Then we did four more pages, and at half past six I said food in the tone of a man raising a point of order, and she said one more sentence, and we did four.