“Well,” he said.
For one second — attingo — the boundary between his skin and the wall dissolved. He did not feel plaster. He felt a pulse. Not his own. Older. A rhythm of hands reaching across time to other hands. attingo
He lowered his hand slowly, not to his side, but to his chest. He pressed his palm over his heart. The tremor was visible now. “Well,” he said
He had come back today to say goodbye.
She frowned. “Then why?”
“When I was twenty-two,” he said, “my teacher — old Cesare — took me to a chapel in Bologna. A Madonna by a painter no one remembers. Cesare said: ‘Matteo, touch her cheek. Gently. Just once. Because one day you will forget what it feels like to believe that something this beautiful was made by hands like yours.’ ” He felt a pulse
And he walked down the path into the evening, his dead hand swinging at his side, but his heart — for the first time in two years — utterly, impossibly, light.