Turin, Briefly

The library that holds Giulia’s papers is on the second floor of a building three streets back from the river, and you get in by filling in a form that asks for your profession, your reason, and the name of somebody who will vouch for you. She deposited the lot in 2011, after a chest infection and a tax inspection arrived in the same fortnight and convinced her she would die at sixty and be misremembered. Fourteen boxes then. Nineteen now.

We went for three days in the second week of November, because there were four readings in chapter five we could not settle out of the air, and because I have reached the stage of a working life where I will travel nine hundred kilometres rather than write a footnote saying the reading is uncertain.

That is the honest professional account of the trip. It is complete. I want it noticed that it does not contain a single word about a hotel.

We flew on the Thursday morning on different aeroplanes, having established by email that we were not going to pretend to be people who coordinate. I got in at six. My hotel is two minutes from Porta Nuova on a street with a tram, and I have stayed in it since I was twenty-four because it is cheap, the floors are stone, and nobody there has ever once asked how long I was in Turin for. I came through the door with my bag and there was a man at the desk in a grey coat holding out a passport, and the back of his head told me before the rest of him did.

The archive sends every accredited reader the same letter, with a list of three hotels that give the reading-room rate. He had booked from the list, like a rational man. I had booked because I have booked it for fourteen years, and it is on the list because it is that kind of place.

“No,” I said, from the door.

He turned round with the passport still in his hand. Whatever went across his face he got under control faster than I got mine.

“The letter,” he said.

“The letter.”

“There were three.”

“There were three, and one is out by the barracks and one charges for breakfast,” I said, which was the wrong thing to say, because it explained in thirteen words how well I know this city, and therefore how many times I have come back to it and not stayed at my mother’s.

He turned to the desk and told the girl there were two of them, two rooms, the second under Basile, and she found it and said quarta e sesta and gave us each a key on a wooden fob the size of a door handle.

Fourth and sixth. The same corridor. A house with two doors, I thought, and then declined to have thought it.

· · ·Scene break

The reading room takes pencils and nothing else. No bags, no pens, no coats, no telephones. You sit at a long table under a high window with a foam cradle in front of you, and the librarian at the end of the room can tell from the sound when somebody has turned a page badly.

They brought us boxes seven, eight and nine, which are La casa a due porte from 2019 to the spring of this year. By ten past nine we had stopped speaking. By half past ten I had forgotten there was anybody else in the building, which is the highest compliment I can pay another person’s silence.

Box eight settled three of our four readings before lunch. The word on page sixty-one, the one from her mother, the one she told us to leave strange — she had written it three ways across two drafts, and the version in our typescript is not a typist’s mangling. It is the strangest of the three, and she arrived at it last. Beside it in the 2021 draft she had written così. Like this. To nobody. To herself.

“She chose it,” Mateo said, barely out loud, because of the librarian.

“She chose it four years ago, and then she sat with it and chose it again.”

“Then we leave it strange.”

At half past eleven I reached the first chapter in its 2019 state, and read four pages of it with my hands flat on the table like a woman being searched, and then put a finger an inch above the paper, because I am not an animal, and said his name once.

The espresso-machine sentence was already there. She had it before she had the wife’s name, because in that draft Nella is called Renata, which I am never going to be able to unknow.

Nella piangeva dentro la macchina del caffè, in piedi, con il cappotto ancora addosso. Non era una cosa che si potesse raccontare dopo.

A full stop. In 2019 that sentence had a full stop in it.

In the margin of the 2021 draft, at the same line, was the joined stroke and comma that anybody who has typed her drafts knows means change this mark, and the word no, and beneath it, running uphill: una cosa sola. One single thing.

Mateo read it twice. He is not vain about being wrong; he is something worse, which is orderly about it, and I have watched him concede in four languages with the expression of a man signing for a parcel. So I was not prepared for what he did, which was to sit back in his chair in a silent room and look at the ceiling for five seconds.

“You were right,” he said.

“That isn’t—“

“In October. Day one. Nineteen minutes.” He was still looking up. “You were right, and I knew you were right at about minute eleven, and I went on for another eight because I could not find my way to saying it in that room. I’m saying it in this one.”

At the end of the table the librarian turned a page.

“Okay,” I said, which is apparently a word I have started using, and I went back to box eight and read nothing whatsoever in it for about a quarter of an hour.

· · ·Scene break

Box nine is this year, and this year is thin. Forty sheets. She was ill from March and worked anyway, and the hand in box nine climbs more steeply, which is not a metaphor. It is what happens to handwriting when the arm is tired.

Chapter three is in box nine. The question the sister travels nine hundred kilometres to ask was always in the book. The answer was not.

In the 2021 draft, Nella answers her sister with a paragraph nine lines long, about how forgiveness is a transaction requiring two parties and how she has never been offered the other half of it. It is intelligent. It is beautifully built. It is exactly what a woman says when she has had four years to prepare a position.

Giulia struck the whole of it out this year with two diagonal lines, wrote the kitchen sentence underneath in pencil, and typed it in.

I sat with that a while. She cut her own good paragraph — the quotable one, the one that would have done her credit — in the last months of her life, and put two plain sentences and a cup in its place. I know exactly what that revision is, because it is the one I cannot make. She took out the place to stand.

One other thing, briefly. In folder four there is an undated card she wrote and never sent, in her private shorthand, and in the middle of it, between two abbreviations, the mark. The one that is not quite an ampersand. She used it for and. I looked at it as long as I could justify and put the folder back, and I did not fold anything and did not put anything into my bag, with him nine inches away the whole time, and I would like some credit for that.

· · ·Scene break

We ate on the Thursday night behind the station, at a place where the tables are too close together and there is one dish on the board in chalk.

The man came over with his pad, and I said, “Per lui il brasato, e un quartino di rosso,” at the same moment that Mateo said, “Per lei il vitello tonnato, senza pane,” and the man wrote both down, because he had been doing his job for forty years and was not going to be the one who found this remarkable.

I did not notice for ten minutes. That is the part I want to be accurate about. We were arguing over whether Nella’s sister is kind or only frightened, and the food came, and my plate arrived with no bread beside it because I do not eat bread in the evening, and his arrived with a small carafe because he will not open a bottle on a working trip.

I put my fork down.

“We just did that,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Neither of us asked.”

“No.” He filled my water glass, which was a separate offence, then heard himself do it and stopped with the bottle in the air. “I’d apologise, but I’d have to decide first which part of it I was apologising for.”

“Don’t. If you apologise we will have to have a conversation about it.”

“Agreed.”

“It is very efficient,” I said.

“It is very efficient,” he said, and we ate the food the other one had chosen, and in both cases it was what we wanted, and neither of us mentioned it again for the rest of the trip.

· · ·Scene break

My mother rang at ten past nine, when I was back in room six with the shutters open and the tram going past every eleven minutes.

I had not told her I was in Turin. I had told her I was coming before Christmas, properly, for a week, a sentence I have been issuing at intervals for six years.

“Stai mangiando?” she said, because that is how she opens, always, before hello.

“I’ve just eaten.”

“What did you eat?”

“Brasato,” I said, and then spent an interval not thinking about the fact that I had named his dish, because mine had been too much and I had eaten half of his off the plate.

She wanted to hear about the book. She calls it il libro della Giulia, with the article on the name, a Turin construction my Edinburgh ear has spent twenty years failing to stop finding beautiful.

Then she said, “E lui?”

Not Mateo. She has not said his name since the decree, out of a loyalty I never asked for and cannot decline without appearing to want it.

“He’s working on it as well,” I said. “It was left to both of us. I told you in October.”

“You told me it was left to you and a colleague.”

“He is a colleague.”

There was a pause on the line of a length I recognised, because I invented it.

“Mangia,” she said in the end. “At lunch as well, not only at night. You have always done that.”

I said I would. I said I would come in December, properly, for a week.

Then I put the telephone face down on a bedside table in a hotel four streets from her kitchen and sat on the end of the bed in my coat, in the city I am from, with a tram going past, having lied to my mother twice in four minutes without saying anything that was untrue.

· · ·Scene break

It came on the Friday, in the reading room, at about half past two.

We had three boxes open and a query sheet between us, and I had been looking at the verb mancare in a list of Giulia’s own vocabulary notes for long enough that Mateo had stopped working and was waiting, pencil down, in the way he waits.

I had not planned it. That is the thing about the rule I had not understood in October. I thought it would be like a toast, something you brace for and deliver. It arrives while you are looking at something else.

“Il primo seminario che ho fatto dopo il divorzio era sul verbo mancare,” I said, “e sono uscita dall’aula a metà.”

The first seminar I gave after the divorce was on the verb mancare, and I walked out of the room halfway through.

I could have explained it. Nothing in the rule stops me explaining; the rule only binds him. I could have said that mancare turns the sentence round — that Italian will not let you say I miss you, it makes you say you are missing from me, and puts the absence where the subject goes and the person who has to live with it into the case reserved for things that are done to you. I could have said there were thirty-one postgraduates in front of me, and that I had got as far as two words on the board in blue.

I said none of that. I did not say the two words either, and I knew while I was not saying them that he would notice, because there is nobody alive better at hearing which word a person has gone round.

He did not translate it. He did not give it back to me in Spanish, where they do the same thing. He did not write anything down.

He picked up his pencil, turned it once end over end, and laid it flat between us on the table, parallel to the edge, in a reading room with no groove in any of the furniture.

Then he said, “Box nine, folder two. There’s a page reference in her hand I can’t read,” and pushed it across, and we worked until five.

· · ·Scene break

The corridor on that floor is nine or ten metres long with a window at the end that does not open, and a runner down the middle the colour of old wine.

We came up together on the Friday night, because the lift takes two people and neither of us proposed that one of us wait.

He stopped at four. I went on to six and put my key in, and it stuck, the way it has stuck since 2011, and I turned round to say something about the key, and he was still at his own door with his own key in his hand, not having opened it, facing the wrong way down a corridor.

“Nine o’clock,” I said. “It shuts at one on Saturdays.”

“Nine o’clock,” he said.

Two doors, five metres apart, shut within about four seconds of each other. I know that because I counted, which I had not intended to do, and which I am writing down because I have decided to stop leaving things out of my own account.