A Pair of Secateurs

My mother telephoned on the second of January to say that she was coming on the sixth, that she would not stay in the house, and that I was not to cook.

She has been up this hill four times since I was eleven. Twice while my father was alive, once for the funeral, when she stood at the back of the church in a grey coat and left before the meal, and once in the March after it, for two hours, to sign something.

She came in a Panda with Genoa plates and a crack across the windscreen, up our gravel far too fast, and got out in shoes that were wrong for the surface and had been wrong on the day she bought them.

“Marisol.” She held me at arm’s length and looked at me the way you look at fruit. “You are thinner and your hair is better. Where is the boathouse?”

“Down at the bottom. It’s the Lombardis’ now.”

“Good,” said my mother. “I hated that boathouse.”

She had brought a panettone from the station at Milan, a bottle of something from a shop in Genoa that I could not have sold to a German off a boat, and a pair of secateurs, which are for roses and which I have kept and will keep.

· · ·Scene break

She wanted to walk the terraces, so we walked them, badly, because of the shoes.

She did not ask about Brix or the loan or the co-operative. She asked whether the wall on the second terrace was the one her uncle rebuilt, and whether the fig at the top was still there, and where exactly I had been standing when I was six and put my hand into a wasps’ nest in the netting, all of which she remembered better than I did.

At the top wall she stopped at the gap into 214/c and looked at the cut ground and the stumps and the black where the fire had been.

“So he got his terrace back in the end.”

“I got it back. It’s mine.”

“Yes,” she said. “That is what I said.”

We had lunch in the kitchen at my father’s table, which she sat down at without any of the difficulty I had been braced for, and she ate bread and cheese and two of my olives and talked about a woman she works with at the hospital in Genoa who has opinions about tiles, for thirty-five minutes, until the room had got used to her.

And then she put her glass down.

“Now. You will tell me about Rinaldi, because Amadei’s sister rang me in November and I have been waiting seven weeks to be asked and you are not going to ask, so I am going to start.”

“Mamma—“

“He kissed you behind a café and the whole village priced your vineyard down by a hundred and thirty-five thousand euros and you sold your father’s boathouse, and now he does not come up the hill and you are not sleeping, because I have seen the light on in this kitchen from the road at half past two in the morning, twice, on my way up. Have I got it right or have I got it wrong?”

“You’ve got it right.”

“Then tell me why he does not come up the hill.”

So I told her. All of it, in order, because I had told nobody and I have to be honest about how much I wanted to. The bank, the house in via Costa, the nine days, the twenty-two minutes on the ninth of September, the letter to the Consorzio, the last afternoon of the year, one harvest at the day rate with nothing promised.

She listened the whole way through with her hand flat on the table.

“And you said no to him.”

“I said we start the pruning on the eleventh.”

“That is not the same as no,” said my mother, “but it is the same as not saying yes, which in this family is a decision that takes four years.”

· · ·Scene break

I made the argument then. My good one. The one I had made on a bench above the water in November and in a branch office in Menaggio and to myself at half past two in the morning with the light on.

That if I am with him, everything I do at Le Rive belongs to him. That the pick and the press and the blend and the fruit that came in dry on the twenty-ninth of September will all, in the end, get handed across to the man, and there is no argument I can ever make against it, because the moment I make it I am a woman defending her lover. That I have exactly one thing that nobody in this valley can take off me, which is that I got it right on my own, and that I would be giving it away for company.

She waited until I had finished all of it.

“Whose sentence is that?”

“It’s mine.”

“It is his,” said my mother. “That is your father in your mouth, word for word, and you have got his rhythm as well. You will not be taken for a girl with a diploma. He said it to me about the co-operative in 1996, he said it to you at fifteen, he said it to Rinaldi on a crate in a press house with a cardiologist’s letter in his jacket. It is a good sentence. It kept his vineyard. It also meant that for fourteen years I lived with a man who never once lied to me and who arranged me — kindly, at the table, in front of guests, and he was usually right — and I left him because I could not find the place where I had agreed to anything.”

“He was protecting me.”

“Marisol. He has been dead for two years and four months and you are still asking his permission about a man he did not like.” She turned her glass round on the wood. “That is what I drove up here to say and now I have said it badly. You have spent two years being careful with a dead man’s opinion. The dead are very easy to be careful with. They never argue and they never change their minds and they never once say thank you, and you can go on being careful with them until you are fifty-eight and sitting in a flat in Genoa with a woman who has opinions about tiles.”

“That isn’t fair.”

“No.”

“He couldn’t have known he was going to die in September.”

“He had a letter from a cardiologist in his pocket and he spent the conversation on you,” said my mother. “I am not going to tell you your father was a bad man, because he was not and you would stop listening. I am telling you he was a man who could not bear to leave a thing unarranged, and that the last thing he arranged was which man his daughter was allowed to want, and that everyone involved was very careful and nobody asked you, and you have now spent two years finishing the job for him yourself.”

The fridge cut in behind me. I counted it, because I count things, and it was eleven seconds.

· · ·Scene break

She said one unfair thing before she left and I am going to put it down because it is hers.

“You chose him,” she said, in the yard, with the car door open. “At eleven, in the hall in Genoa, with your bag. You chose the hill and you chose him and you did it in front of me, and I have never entirely forgiven you for it, and that is my failing and not yours, and I have driven three hours to say so and I will not be doing it again.”

And then, because she is my mother and constitutionally incapable of leaving a room on the correct line, she put her hand on the side of my face in the cold and said:

“You did not get your nose from him, you know. He could not find a corked bottle at forty centimetres and he used to watch my mother’s face and say it afterwards. You got it from her. She was a cook in Nervi and she could smell a bad egg through a shell. You are not standing on that hill because Piero Bianchi made you. Half of what you are came up from Genoa in the back of a car.”

She would not sleep in the house. She took a room at the albergo in Pianello, which has four of them and has never had all four full, and I drove her down at seven and she said she would go in the morning without a scene.

· · ·Scene break

I came out of the albergo at about nine and stood in the street.

Via Costa is two streets up, which in Pianello is ninety metres, and I did not decide anything. I want that written properly. I did not stand in the road and weigh it and come to a view. I got as far as the corner by the tobacconist, where you can see the lake at the bottom between the houses, and found that I had stopped being able to think of a single reason that was mine.

What I had instead of reasons, standing at that corner in January with my hands in my sleeves, was three weeks of a thing I had been putting somewhere else. His forearms on the frame of a press in a doorway at two in the morning in September. His hand coming down over the top of mine on the lever of a corker, seventeen times, in the dark, in a room with no power in it. The hour in November when he sat at my table with his boots off under it and argued about racking and I did not hear a word of it after about half eleven. I had spent the whole of the autumn counting things so that I did not have to notice that I was counting those.

I had also not touched him since the tenth of December. I had not been within a metre of him since the tenth of December, and on the thirty-first of December I had stood four metres away in my own gravel and made myself keep still, and I had been paying for it every night since at about half past two with the kitchen light on.

There was a light on in his kitchen. The courtyard gate was on the latch, because it is always on the latch, because nobody in that house has ever had anything worth taking.

I knocked. It took him about four seconds.

He had his sleeves pushed past the elbow and a stone and an oil can on the kitchen table behind him and half of Ettore’s secateurs in bits on a cloth, sharpening them for the eleventh, five days early, because a man with nothing to do will sharpen anything.

He did not say anything at all. He stood in his own doorway and looked at me and went completely still, and the noise of the lake came up the street between the houses.

“Don’t ask me in yet,” I said. “I’ve had every important conversation of my life in a building, in the dark, with a torch on its end between me and somebody, and I’m going to have this one on a step.

“I want you. Not for the harvest and not at the day rate. I’ve wanted you since a doorway in September two years ago and I want you tonight, in this house, and I’ve come down here on the sixth of January on purpose, while you’ve got no contract and no share and nothing of mine and I’ve got no debt and nothing of yours, because I need it to be true that neither of us can ever say afterwards it was about the vineyard.

“And I’m asking, not telling. If you want me to go home, say it and I’ll go, and I’ll be at that gate at seven on the eleventh with the wire, and I will never bring it up again as long as I live.”

He put his hand on the door frame.

“Marisol.” And then he said it plainly, which out of him is like a different man walking in, and he did not take his eyes off my face for a word of it. “I have slept in the room above this kitchen since I was nineteen years old and I have never once brought anybody up those stairs. Not because I’m good. Because I could not think of one person I wanted still to be there in the morning.

“I want you here tonight. I want you here tomorrow, and on the seventh, and in the middle of February when there is nothing to do and nothing to say and the rain is on that window for nine days. I have no way of putting that which isn’t a promise, and I’ve nothing left to stand behind a promise with, so you’ll have to take it as it is.

“And you can go home. I want that said before and not after, because I’ll not have you standing on my step in the cold wondering whether it costs you the pruning. Nothing that happens tonight changes one thing about the eleventh. I’ll be at your gate at seven whatever you do in the next ten seconds.”

“I know,” I said. “That’s the only reason I’m here.”

“Then say it and it’s yours.”

“Yes.”

“Say it properly,” he said, which is mine, which he had been keeping since a bench in November.

“Yes.”

I stepped in past him, close, close enough that I had to turn my shoulder, and he did not move out of the way and neither of us pretended it was an accident. He smelled of oil and cold air and the inside of that house. He put his hand up to the side of my face the way I had put mine to his above the water in the dark, and turned his head into it first, which I had not been ready for in November and was not ready for now.

And then I reached behind me with my eyes shut and found the edge of the door, and closed it.