Tuesdays and Thursdays

I went down to Menaggio on the tenth of December to have Serena draft my refusal to Gruppo Vallese, which I wanted in her words and not mine, because mine would have had something in them she would have made me take out.

I was on her stairs at nine, in a good mood.

“Sit. Coat off,” she said. “You have come about Vitali and you are going to tell me you are refusing her, and I am going to write it in three lines and you are going to want four.”

“Three is fine.”

“Three is never fine with you.” She took the cap off the pen. “And before that, so the file is straight. I have the variation from the branch. It came on Tuesday.”

“The what?”

Serena Nardi does not have a face that does much. It did something then.

“The variation of the loan,” she said, slowly, in the voice of a woman putting her hand out into a dark room. “Venturini’s office sent me the draft on Tuesday for the borrower’s execution. The call clause released, the balance re-termed over eight years at three point one, secured by a first charge over the house in via Costa and a personal guarantee capped at two hundred and fourteen thousand. With a five-year undertaking as to technical direction, which is the only clause I would have argued about, and I was going to argue about it next Thursday, in this office, with you.”

The boat from Varenna came in under the window. You can hear it in that room.

“Whose house is in via Costa?”

“Marisol.”

“Serena. Whose house.”

“You did not know,” she said.

“Whose house.”

“Teodoro Rinaldi’s,” said Serena, and put the pen down flat.

· · ·Scene break

I am going to give her her due, because she gave herself none.

She got the file out and put the whole of it in front of me and went and stood by the window with her back to me while I read it, which took eleven minutes, and she did not say one word of comfort in the whole of that time, which is the only reason I got through it.

Then she said: “In October you made that man write out fourteen thousand one hundred and sixty euros as a loan at two per cent and lodge it in this office so that it could never be called a gift. I have that note in the cabinet behind you. I have sat in this room and watched you take a biro to a man who was trying to give you money.” She turned round. “So when a bank sends me a charge over his house against your debt, what I read is a woman who has decided how it is going to be done and a man doing it her way. I did not ring you. It did not cross my mind to ring you, because you have never once in fifteen months left me anything to find out.”

“You told me in September that you make a point of not delivering news.”

“I have now done it twice to the same girl,” she said. “Both times about the same man. You may take that up with me at a better hour.”

I asked her for two things before I went down the stairs.

The first was the refusal to Vallese, three lines, which she wrote while I was sitting there and read out loud and did not soften.

The second was a valuation of the lower parcel — the meadow, the boathouse, the cottage, the shore frontage, the lot. She asked me nothing about why. She said the surveyor from Dongo could be up on the Saturday, and I said not him, find me another one, and she wrote another one on her pad and underlined it.

· · ·Scene break

The branch is four hundred metres along the front. Venturini is there on Tuesdays and Thursdays and it was a Thursday, which I had known since the nineteenth of November, because I was the one who told Theo.

He stood up when I came in. He has a photograph of a boat on his desk and he is a courteous man and I had decided on the walk that I would not be anything other than exact.

“The variation on the Le Rive account,” I said. “It requires the borrower’s execution. I am the borrower. I am not going to execute it, and I would like that from me in writing today, and I would like it recorded that no charge over any property in via Costa is to be registered in connection with this account, now or at any point.”

“Signorina, may I say one thing as a banker and then I will type it.”

“You may say it as a banker.”

“It is the best structure that has been in front of this file in seven years, and if you decline it the committee’s position on the thirty-first of December is what it was in October.” He turned the screen. “I would be failing you if I did not tell you that.”

“Noted. Type it.”

He typed it. While the printer was going I asked him the other thing, because I had learned in October that you ask the ugly questions in the room and not in the car.

“In November I asked you whether he had telephoned you. You said not since September.”

“He had not telephoned me,” said Venturini. “He came in. On the twenty-fourth, at eleven. I answered the question you asked me, signorina, and I have thought about it since, and I would answer it the same way, and I am sorry.”

“Did he ask you not to contact me?”

Venturini looked at the photograph of his boat.

“He asked that nothing be sent up to the estate until the file was complete,” he said. “It is not an unusual request. People like to bring a finished thing.”

· · ·Scene break

I was back on the hill at twenty past twelve, in the middle of the day, with the sun on the yard.

I want it on the record that I did not do this at night, and I did not do it in a cellar, and I did not do it with a torch standing on its end between us. Everything that had ever gone wrong between those two men and me had happened in the dark in a building. I parked in the gravel and I walked up to the crush pad where he was cleaning the small pump, and I did it in the open, at half past twelve, where Ettore could see us from the press house and did not come out.

“The tenth of December,” I said. “Serena has the draft variation. Venturini has my refusal in writing. There is no charge going on your house.”

He put the pump down. He did not ask me how I knew, and he did not say a single word in his own defence in the whole of what followed, and I have never been more angry with anybody in my life.

“Say it,” I said. “All of it, out loud, so there’s no version afterwards where I was hysterical about paperwork.”

“I went to Venturini on the twenty-fourth of November. I had the house valued on the twenty-third. I offered a first charge at a hundred and fifty, a guarantee capped at your balance, and five years of technical direction on the file, personally. The offer in principle came on the third of December. I was going to bring it to you on the morning of the fifteenth.”

“Before the Vallese meeting.”

“Before the Vallese meeting.”

“So that I could refuse her.”

“So that you could refuse her,” he said, “and not lose the boathouse, and not be at that woman’s table at all.”

“And on the sixth of December, in my cellar, when I told you I was going to sell the lower parcel, you asked me not to sign anything before Christmas.”

He looked at me then. He did not look down the row or at the netting or at the lake.

“Yes,” he said.

“Nine days. You asked me for nine days of not doing the one thing that would have got me out of this on my own, and you asked for it so that you could finish a piece of paper I would have stopped you writing.” I heard my own voice and it was perfectly level, which frightened me. “That is not the bank, Theo. The bank is a thing you did. That is what you took off me while you were doing it.”

“I know what I did.”

“Then I’ll tell you what it is, because I’ve had four hours in a car with it and I’ve finally got it in one piece.” I put my hands in my pockets so they would stop. “On the ninth of September you sat on a wall for twenty-two minutes and let me sleep. I have thought about those twenty-two minutes every week for two years. It is the kindest thing anybody has ever done for me. And I have never said the rest of it to you, and I’m going to now, because it’s the same sentence as this morning’s.

“I would rather you had rung me. At ten past seven, from the terrace, with him sitting against the post. I would rather have come up that hill in my nightdress and been useless and seen it. It was my father and it was my morning and you decided what I could survive and you took it, and you took it kindly, and you have been taking things kindly ever since, and they get bigger. Two glasses of wine. Twenty-two minutes. Eleven hundred and eighty euros on the sixth of the month. And now your house against my debt and five years of your name on my file, and a woman in Menaggio who assumed I must know because surely — surely — nobody would do that to a person without asking.”

“Marisol—“

“There’s a man in Sondrio, isn’t there,” I said. “Or a way to do it through the co-operative. Or somebody who owes you two favours.”

He opened his mouth, and stopped, and I watched him stop. I watched a man get to the edge of his own reflex in broad daylight and see it for what it was, and it was, I think, the worst four seconds of his life.

“Yes,” he said. “There was.”

“I know. There always is.” And then the only part I had not rehearsed. “I’m not going to take your money and I’m not going to take your house and I’m not going to take five years of you underwriting me at a bank, and I am not going to do this with you either. Don’t come at six.”

“All right.”

“Don’t be reasonable about it. Argue with me.”

“No,” he said.

He picked up the pump and set it down square on the bench, the way he sets everything down, and went down the track on foot, and left the van in my gravel until the evening, and the next morning there was no coffee on the wall for the first time in two years and two months.

· · ·Scene break

I asked Ettore on the Saturday, in the yard, like a Christian.

“I want to sell the lower parcel to your family. The meadow, the boathouse and the cottage. Not to a company, not to Vitali, not to a man from Milan.”

He looked at me for a long time.

“No.”

“Ettore—“

“I will not be the man who bought Piero Bianchi’s boathouse,” he said. “I have swept that floor. I have pulled his boat up that slip in November for thirty years. You are asking me to become a thing people say.”

“I’m asking you because there is nobody else on this lake I would let have it.”

So we argued for two days, and on the second day Rocco came up from Domaso, who is thirty-four and has hired boats off a rented slip for nine years and had a mortgage approved in the October for a place that fell through, and the three of us stood on the meadow in the rain.

The valuation came back at two hundred and seventy-two thousand on the open market with consent for the cottage. I offered it to them at two hundred and fourteen, which is the number I owed the bank, and Ettore refused it and paid two hundred and eighteen, because, he said, a man does not buy a boathouse for the exact size of a debt; it insults both of us. Forty-four thousand of his own, which is thirty years of not going anywhere, and a hundred and seventy-four of Rocco’s.

The terms are mine. I wrote them at my father’s table on the fifteenth of December and Serena tidied the grammar and told me twice that clause four would annoy a court and put it in anyway.

The boathouse is not to be demolished or raised above its present roof line. There is a right of way from the terraces to the water for the owner of Le Rive, in perpetuity, registered. No resale for fifteen years to a company, or to any person owning vines on this shore, and first refusal to Le Rive at valuation. And the two-room cottage is Ettore Lombardi’s for his lifetime, which he shouted at me about in my own yard for eleven minutes and then accepted with his hat in his hand.

I asked for one more thing and he would not write it down.

“I want to be allowed to swim off the steps.”

“That is not a clause,” said Ettore. “That is a Tuesday.”

· · ·Scene break

We completed on the twenty-second of December at half past ten in Serena’s office, and Rocco brought his daughter, who is six, and she sat on the floor under the shelves with the files in year order and drew on the back of a land registry form.

I signed it on my own. Nobody drove me down. Nobody came in with me.

My father taught me to row off those steps. He was no good at it. He was a man who could tell you the pH of a tank from the smell and he could not get a boat away from a wall without swearing, and once, when I was nine, he lost an oar and went in after it in his trousers and came out with a bootful of the lake and sat on the steps eating bread and anchovies and laughing at himself for twenty minutes. That is the whole of it. That is the last place in the world where my father is an ordinary man and not an opinion I am carrying.

I sold it to pay a debt he took out, so that I could keep the hill he cared about more.

Serena put the pen down and said, “It is a clean file,” and I stood up and looked out of her window at the lake, which belonged to nobody, and understood that for the first time in my life a piece of paper had just made this place mine — because I had been the one to give something away, alone, in daylight, with no man in the room.

It is the best thing I have ever done. I would not put my hand in that water again for two years.