A Bit of a Do

Four days later they reached Villafeliz de la Sierra, which promised rather more in its name than it delivered. It had an enormous square with arcades, plane trees and a fountain that two girls were cycling round. The café was open and a man was watering his pots, but it was a shame to see so much space going to waste.

“What a lovely square,” said Hortensia.

The man with the plant pots looked up.

“It was.”

And went back to his watering.

They had dinner in the bar. Packet soup, tortilla and a rough red that Hortensia said was delicious out of politeness. The bar owner didn’t say much, but when Hortensia asked him about the square he leaned on the counter with both hands.

“There used to be a fiesta here you wouldn’t believe. Three days. They’d put up a stage out of planks and anyone who wanted could get up. My uncle kept a list in a notebook and he’d put you down: you at nine, you at twenty past nine. The lad from the garage used to get up with his accordion. The sewing ladies used to get up and do this thing with aprons that had everyone howling.”

“And what happened?”

“Nothing. My uncle died and that year it didn’t happen, out of respect. And the next year it didn’t either, because if not last year then why bother.” He picked up a glass and started drying it. “And that’s twenty now. There was no row, you know. Nobody said ‘that’s it’. It just got left, bit by bit.”

He let them put the tent up under the arcades, in a corner.

That night, sitting on the rim of the fountain, Eva started singing one of her own songs. The arcades sent her voice back a fraction late, and she amused herself listening to it, as if someone were answering from the far end.

She stopped for a second, laughed and carried on louder.

Lights came on at a couple of balconies and someone opened a shutter on the second floor. They listened from indoors without clapping, and when Eva stopped, the sound of the fountain returned.

“Right,” said Hortensia, pulling her cardigan straight. “Bed, we’ve got walking to do tomorrow.”

At twenty to eight Axel was woken up by a clanking of metal.

Three men were unloading metal staging poles from a van parked in the middle of the square. The paint was chipped and the layer of dust gave some idea of how many years they’d spent in storage.

The bar owner was standing in his doorway with his coffee in his hand.

“What’s all this?” said Axel.

“They were in my uncle’s hayloft. The poles, the bulbs, the planks and two boxes of bunting. And the list, in a shoebox.” He took a sip of his coffee. “Twenty years in there. And this morning my cousin turns up at half seven and says ‘let’s get the poles down’. And I said fine.”

“And why this morning?”

The man looked at him very calmly.

“That’s what I’m asking myself.”

And he went inside.

On top of the heap of poles, sitting on the highest one with his hands on his hips, was Gorgorito. Running the job.

“That one in from the left, you numpty!” he was shouting at a man who weighed a hundred and twenty kilos. “From the left, it won’t go in like that, you melon!”

The man, who couldn’t hear him, banged it in from the right. It went in first time.

“That’s it!” shouted Gorgorito, delighted. “That’s what I was telling you, big lad!”

Axel rubbed his eyes. When he opened them the top pole was empty, and one of the men was saying that was odd, he could’ve sworn he’d left the spanner up there.

While they packed up the tent, the square began to fill with neighbours carrying whatever they’d found: a woman with coloured bulbs, a lad with a ladder… The café owner opened early and put the radio on.

“Shall we stay?” said Axel.

Hortensia looked at Eva, who was standing in the square with the cat in her arms, watching the woman with the bulbs.

“No,” said Hortensia. “It’s theirs.”

Hortensia stayed right where she was and, five minutes later, put her rucksack down to explain to two men that they were fitting a plank the wrong way round. She was right, by the way. In the end they stayed all day.

Axel ended up on the lad’s ladder hanging bulbs, because he was the tallest.

“This one won’t come on, mate!”

“Well, stick another one in, there’s a whole box!”

Hortensia went into a kitchen at eleven and came out at two with a dish of tortilla and everybody’s name off by heart.

“And whose tortilla is that?” said Axel from the ladder.

“Mine, now.”

Eva sat on the kerb with Kika and spent the morning watching the bustle in the square.

By eight in the evening the stage was up next to the plane trees, and thirty-one coloured bulbs were hanging from the string, because the others didn’t come on.

What still hadn’t appeared was a band, a poster with a programme, or anyone who knew what time things were meant to start.

The stage creaked as the bar owner climbed onto it with the shoebox. From the box he took a notebook with its covers gone soft from the damp.

“This is my uncle’s list. From the last fiesta.”

He opened the notebook and began reading out the names and times.

“The lad from the garage, at nine. He died eight years ago.”

Nobody said anything.

“The sewing ladies, at twenty past nine. There’s two of you left, and one’s in the armchair.”

A very old woman, sitting in a chair someone had brought out to her doorway, put her hand up and laughed.

“The girl who used to do recitations. She lives away and she’s got three kids.”

Nearly all of them were dead or far away. And at every name someone said something from down below: that one got married, that one still plays but can’t manage stairs any more. And the square kept filling up and nobody left.

The bar owner shut the notebook.

“So there you go. The list’s empty. Anyone who wants to can get up.”

Nobody got up. They’d managed to light thirty-one bulbs and gather about eighty people to stare at their shoes in front of an empty stage.

“The girl from last night!” a man shouted from the back. “Get her to sing.”

Eva had Fay on her lap. She shook her head.

“Not today.”

“Up you get, then,” the barman told the man.

The man put his hands in his pockets.

Gorgorito came out from behind the shoebox, planted himself in the middle of the stage and took a bow that nearly brought his nose to the floor. Then he pressed a hand to his mouth and blew an enormously long raspberry.

Axel couldn’t hold back a laugh. Several faces turned towards him.

“Are you going to kick us off?” the barman asked him.

“No, no. I was…”

Gorgorito pointed at him with both hands, delighted to have landed him in it.

Hortensia put the dish of tortilla on the ground.

“Oh, I’ll get up myself, I can’t watch this.”

She went up the three steps holding onto the rail, in her cardigan and tracksuit bottoms, stood in the middle and looked at the square like you’d look at the queue at the doctor’s.

“I’m not from round here. I’m a lady who was passing through, and I’ve gatecrashed more weddings than any of you, so I know how this goes.” She cleared her throat. “I’m going to tell you how I fell into a horse trough on the day of my first communion.”

She told them about the gloves, the crown made of butcher’s paper and the shove from her brother, and this time it came out even better than it had on the road.

“And there were frogs!” She held one hand up high, fingers spread, like it was still dripping. “And slime. And the priest sprinkling holy water on everyone except me, because I’d already had mine.”

Halfway through they were laughing. At the end, when she said “and I had a better time than any of them”, the old woman in the armchair banged her stick twice and the whole square clapped.

Axel, sitting halfway up the ladder, clapped too, with a dead bulb in his hand.

Hortensia came down flushed like a schoolgirl, her chin held high.

After her came the lad with the ladder, who knew a trick with a hanky, then two women who could remember bits of a song. By eleven another neighbour was playing an accordion at the foot of the stage, and the whole square was singing something Axel didn’t know.

Eva didn’t get up. But Axel saw her feet moving to the music, bare on the stones of the square, with Fay next to her on the kerb.

Axel spotted Gorgorito curled up inside a blue pennant just above the stage, sleeping soundly in the middle of all the racket.

At first light, the barman found them packing up the tent. He had the notebook under his arm.

“Shall I put you down for tonight?” he asked Hortensia.

“No, love. We’re off.”

“Who’s going to start, then?”

The lad with the ladder was picking up glasses round the fountain.

“I’m not doing the handkerchief again,” he said. “They’ve all seen it.”

“Then you introduce the others. You’re not exactly short of words.”

“And you help me with the handkerchief.”

“They’ll work the trick out.”

“They’ve already worked mine out. They haven’t seen yours yet.”

The barman opened the notebook to a fresh page. They left while the two were arguing about what time he could close the bar to get up on the stage.

They walked a kilometre and Axel couldn’t keep it in.

“We could’ve stayed for the whole fiesta, you know. It’s three days.”

“No,” said Hortensia, without turning round. “We’ve put the bulb in. The three days are theirs.”

After a while they heard her muttering something about those twenty years in a hayloft, and had to quicken their pace to catch up.